Phonology as human behavior

Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) may lead to dysarthria which is caused by weakness of the articulatory musculature. This paper investigates Polish TBI dysarthric speakers (n = 6) and matched controls with normal speech (n = 10). The data were transcribed in narrow phonetic transcription and analyzed acoustically. Three TBI subjects were diagnosed with moderate dysarthria and three with mild dysarthria. The results show that the patients regress to some degree in their articulation to the level of first language (L1) acquisition in general and they use many processes which appear in child’s speech in particular. However, some of these processes have been defined as idiosynchratic in L1 acquisition while others do not appear at all.