This study investigated the effect of hearing six background noise conditions (silent baseline, pink noise, monologue, lively conversation, one-sided phone call, and cocktail noise) on acoustic measures of speech production during story retells in people with aphasia. Eleven individuals with aphasia and 11 age- and gender-matched control participants took part in the study. Participants heard the background noise conditions through open-back headphones while they retold six short stories. The examiner calculated mean and standard deviation of intensity, mean and standard deviation of fundamental frequency (F0), and speech rate in words per minute. A Matlab application that identified pauses (i.e., periods of silence greater than 200 ms) computed a speaking time ratio measure (i.e., time speaking versus time pausing). With the exception of the monologue and one-sided phone call condition, both people with aphasia and control participants significantly increase their intensity and F0 in the presence of background noise. Additionally, participants with aphasia have significantly lower speaking time ratios and speaking rates when compared to control participants. Participants make acoustic changes while hearing background noise; speech intensity rises in an effort to increase the signal-to-noise ratio, while mean F0 increases due to a presumed rise in subglottal pressure. Further research is suggested to investigate other acoustic differences, possibly at the segmental level, between speech produced in informational and energetic background noise.

Word retrieval difficulties can affect individuals who have had strokes or head trauma (Goodglass & Wingfield, 1997) and to a lesser extent, typically aging adults. This can affect an individual's ability to name pictures accurately and quickly. Cues are used to help individuals with word retrieval difficulties in fmding specific words. Two commonly used cues are semantic and phonological cues. Semantic cues can be information about the word the person is trying to retrieve, such as its definition, and/or its functions. Phonological cues are usually the initial sound of a word that a person is attempting to retrieve. Previous research has suggested that both of these cues, in isolation, are effective in stimulating word retrieval during naming tasks (Li & Williams 1989; Stirnley & Noll 1991 ). However, research has not investigated the effects of combining these two cues during picture naming tasks. The current study observed participants under four different cueing conditions during a picture naming task with the Boston Naming Test. The four conditions include a control group (received no cues), a semantically cued group (received a semantic cue before being asked to name a picture), a phonologically cued group (received a phonological cue before being asked to name a picture), and a semanticallyphonologically cued group (received a semantic and phonological cue before being asked to name a picture). Each group was compared on number of items correctly named and response times. The results indicated that there was no statistically significant difference between the groups with regard to number of items named. There was a statistically significant difference found between the groups with regards to response times. These findings are discussed and compared to previous research and current word retrieval theories.

Background: A previous systematic review found limited data regarding social participation in working-age people with aphasia (PWA). This population has many roles to fulfill, that are negatively affected by aphasia. A review of recent studies may reveal more information on the challenges in re-establishing social roles and thus may inform treatment thereof. Method: The aim was to provide an updated systematic review on social participation in PWA under 65 years of age. Studies from 2005-2017 were searched from Scopus, Pubmed and Psychinfo. Search terms were derived from the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) and the Aphasia- Framework for Outcomes Measures (A-FROM). Aspects of domestic life, interpersonal relations and interactions, education and employment and community, civic and social life were investigated. Results: From 2,864 initial hits, 11 studies were identified, all of which were on the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) Level III of evidence. The studies indicated that participation in domestic life is reduced and PWA showed reduced social networks, loss of friendships and changes in the quality of marital relations. Few PWA returned to work or spent time on education. Limitations in community, civic and social life were noted and there were contradictory findings on the impact of contextual factors on social participation. There was an increase in research into contextual factors impacting on social participation in PWA and in the use of conceptual frameworks in the last decade. Conclusions: Social participation in working-age adults is limited across the social domains. While the ICF conceptual framework is increasingly used, no studies used the A-FROM. There is greater use of standardised assessments and larger sample sizes. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2017. / Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology / MA / Unrestricted

Background: Aphasia is a language disorder that usually occurs after a brain injury. It is common for the disease to occur in connection with stroke. In Sweden, approximately 8,000 - 10,000 people suffer from aphasia each year, thirty-five percent of them are middle-aged and active. Patients with aphasia have difficulty communicating, which affects several different aspects of the individual's daily life. Aim: The purpose of this literature review was to describe experiences of communication in daily life in patients with aphasia due to stroke. Method: The literature review was performed according to Friberg's model, based on qualitative scientific articles collected from the databases PubMed and Cinahl Complete during the period 2005–2020. Results: The results from twelvescientific articles were used to describe experiences of communication in the daily life of patients with aphasia. This was divided into three main themes: Disease suffering, life suffering and care suffering. The first theme was divided into four different subthemes, the second theme was divided into two subthemes and the third theme had no subthemes. The result was experiences of losing friends, roles in communities and in the family. Changed world of life, led to despair and anger. Many experienced sadness and loneliness. Close relatives and their partners played a significant role in making them feel well. Conclusion: The literature study has shown the importance of communication in the patient's everyday life and conveyed the greatest responsibility that both healthcare staff and society have for treating patients with aphasia, which contributes to a better quality of life.

A prevalent feature of typical spontaneous speech are speech pauses. Longer speech pauses, known as cognitive pauses, occur in typical speech and are indicative of higher-level cognitive processes. Atypical cognitive pauses, however, are prevalent in the speech of people with aphasia consequent to their communication disorder. Research has shown that these atypical pauses may contribute to negative listener perceptions. This study aimed to determine the influence of atypical speech pause on listener perceptions of communicative effectiveness and speaker likeability. Specifically, this study evaluated the relationship between listener ratings of communicative effectiveness and likeability and acoustic measures of between-utterance pause duration, within-utterance pause duration, and the location of within-utterance pauses. This study also examined the relationship between listener ratings of communicative effectiveness and likeability. Target stimuli included 30-second samples of speech from two individuals with mild aphasia and four with moderate aphasia. Using a visual analog scale, 40 adult listeners listened to these speech samples and rated each sample according to the speaker's communicative effectiveness and likeability. Overall, listeners were not as sensitive to between-utterance pauses. While listeners were more sensitive to within-utterance pauses greater than one second, they were similarly impacted by within-utterance pauses between 250-999 milliseconds. Listeners were also more affected by pauses at the beginning of an utterance than at the end of an utterance. Results also demonstrated a strong positive correlation between listener ratings of communicative effectiveness and likeability. In general, results suggest that the location and length of pauses in the speech of people with aphasia have an impact on listeners' perceptions. In combination with future research, the results of this study will provide a deeper understanding of the impact of cognitive pause in people with aphasia, thus improving future clinical assessment and treatment of aphasia.

This study is an examination of how a word’s syntactic category, word length, and usage frequency might impact a speaker’s use of communicative pause. Previously collected between and within utterance language samples from 21 people with aphasia (Harmon, 2018) were evaluated in this study. Participants consisted of 11 individuals diagnosed with mild or very mild aphasia and 10 individuals with moderate aphasia;15 who exhibited fluent subtypes and 6 non-fluent subtypes of aphasia. Data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) was used to code the word frequency and syntactic category of each word in the language samples. Generally, speakers with both non-fluent and fluent aphasia produced more monosyllabic words of very high frequency with a greater percentage of function words than content words. Analyses revealed no significant correlations between the pause duration for either the word length or word frequency for either group of speakers. In relation to syntactic category, no significant differences in pause duration were found between content and function words in the between utterance condition. However, non-fluent speakers preceded content words with significantly shorter pause durations within utterances when compared with the function words. Due to differences in sample sizes between the speaker and syntactic groups, non-parametric statistics were used for some comparisons. In addition, this study does not fully account for the influence of fillers and incomplete words. Despite these limitations, this study will contribute to the research regarding communicative speech pause in speakers with aphasia and provide insight into more useful diagnostic and treatment strategies.

This is a preliminary study investigating the effects of emotion on a confrontational naming task in people with aphasia (PWA). Previous research investigating the effects of emotion on various language tasks in PWA has produced mixed findings with some suggesting a facilitative effect and others an inhibitory effect. Participants included 9 adults with aphasia as the result of a stroke, resulting in the presence of word-finding deficits (i.e., anomia). Participants named images in positive, negative, and neutral conditions. Responses were scored as either correct or incorrect; incorrect responses were coded further to illustrate individual error patterns. The majority of participants demonstrated a decrease in naming accuracy in the negative condition compared to the preceding and subsequent neutral conditions. The results of this study suggest that negative emotional arousal may cause PWA to devote attentional resources to emotional regulation and away from the linguistic task, thus interfering with language performance. Further research is needed to support these preliminary findings.

The purpose of the current study was to determine the effect of emotional arousal and valence on linguistic processing of adults with aphasia and neurotypical young adults. Nine people with aphasia (at least 6 months left hemisphere stroke and presenting with word retrieval deficits) and 20 young adults (reporting no evidence of neurological injury) participated. All participants completed a confrontational naming task during three conditions that were manipulated according to emotional arousal and valence: positive (high arousal, positive valence), negative (high arousal, negative valence), and neutral (low arousal, neutral valence). Average response time was measured for pictures named accurately within each condition. In general, participants with aphasia named pictures more slowly than young adult participants. Neither participant group had significant differences in response time across conditions. Individual participants varied in how emotional valence affected their response times. Further research is needed to identify what factors lead to differing responses to the high-arousal conditions.

People with aphasia are known to have poor word retrieval abilities in communicative tasks. It has also been reported that they have lower, non-optimal levels of physiological arousal, which may cause lower attention levels therefore contributing to poor performance on linguistic tasks. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between physiological arousal and word retrieval in adults with aphasia and neurotypical adults when presented with emotional stimuli within a confrontational naming task. Participants included 6 people with aphasia and 15 neurotypical controls. All participants completed a confrontational naming task within 3 emotional conditions (neutral, positive, negative) and physiological measures (Heart Rate Variability, Skin Conductance) were taken simultaneously. No statistically significant results were found; however, numerical trends were identified in the data that may provide direction when designing future studies.

Previous studies have examined the effect of atypical speech pause on conversational fluency and how the conversational listener perceives the speaker. The present study investigated the effect of pause duration of increasing length and in differing sentential locations on listener perceptions of communicative effectiveness and speaker likability. One neurotypical male and one neurotypical female speaker recorded three sentences from the Quick Aphasia Battery, and artificial pauses of varying lengths (250 ms, 400 ms, 550 ms, 700 ms, 850 ms, and 1 sec) were inserted before the subject, verb, and object of each sentence. The six baseline (unmodified) sentences were also included among the stimuli. These samples were randomly interspersed among foil samples that consisted of 30-second recordings of six people with fluent and nonfluent aphasia of mild to moderate severity. Forty adult participants (24 females and 16 males) listened to and rated the modified and foil samples for communicative effectiveness and the perception of likability of the speaker. A review of the data revealed that pause location may negatively impact speaker likability depending on the gender of the speaker. However, due to the small sample size of speakers (one male and one female) and factors that were not controlled for in this study (e.g., speaker pitch, speech rate, resonance, articulation patterns), these results require validation through further research that utilizes a larger sample. As pause duration increased, both speaker likability and communicative effectiveness ratings decreased. These findings suggest that monitoring pause duration and location in preliminary fluency samples could be beneficial to assess fluency severity and determine appropriate treatment goals. Wordfinding treatment may want to focus on vocabulary words that serve the function of subjects and objects in sentences. Although there are limitations in the methodology and results of this preliminary study, it is hoped that this study combined with future research can help to inform assessment and treatment of people with aphasia and other neurophysiological disorders that lead to atypical pause.