AUDITORY-VISUAL INTERSENSORY PROCESSING AND VERBAL MEDIATION

The present study examined the question of whether auditory-visual intersensory processing is necessarily mediated verbally. Auditory-visual integration was examined in neurologically damaged patients with and without language disturbance and in a control group of non-brain-damaged patients. It was found that both groups of neurologically damaged patients performed more poorly than did the control group. However, there was no real difference in performance between brain-damaged patients with and without language disturbance. It was further found that the degree of language disorder was not related to the degree of auditory-visual integrative incompetence. It was concluded that the presence or absence of language disorder in the brain-injured patients did not differentially affect their auditory-visual integrative performance and that therefore perceptual processing is not necessarily mediated by language.