The purpose of this study was to examine patterns of pause duration and frequency in speakers with moderate nonfluent aphasia and apraxia. The speech recordings analyzed in this study were produced by 16 adult speakers of American English (8 males and 8 females). Speech samples were provided by the AphasiaBank database (i.e., narrative samples from the Cinderella Story). Praat acoustic analysis software was used to code the speech samples for utterance boundaries and durations, as well as between and within filled and silent pause durations and frequencies. Results found a difference in silent versus filled pause durations, with silent pauses that were longer in duration than their filled pause counterparts. Differences in pause durations as a function of pause location were not found to be statistically significant. The majority of correlations between pause patterns and AQ rating were found to be insignificant, with just three measures that were statistically, but not clinically, significant. Gender differences in filled and silent pause durations and frequencies were not found to be significant. There was also a strong positive correlation between utterance duration and within utterance pause rate. Further research on speech pause in people with nonfluent aphasia and apraxia of speech with larger sample sizes, a variety of language contexts, and linguistic analyses is needed in order to better understand expected pause patterns in this population. Despite these limitations, this study provides further information on typical and atypical patterns of pause for clinicians who are assessing people with aphasia and apraxia.

Script training is a technique that allows persons with acquired speech and language disorders, such as nonfluent aphasia, to have islands of fluent speech during which they can speak about a topic without pausing or having word-finding errors. Scripts relevant to specific functional situations are written and practiced until memorized. Script training delivered verbally has been effective with clients with aphasia but the role of written cues in the training has not been explored. Therefore the purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness of script training taught verbally, or verbally with a written script, in persons with aphasia. Three adults, one with Broca’s aphasia and apraxia of speech (AOS), one with Broca’s aphasia, and one with Anomic aphasia were recruited for this study. Participants selected three topics for script training and with the clinician’s help wrote a script and a script prompt for each topic. Scripts were trained one sentence or phrase at a time until 95% repetition accuracy was achieved, then training began for the next script. The effects of two training procedures, verbal only and verbal + written script, were evaluated with a multiple baseline design across training procedures, the order of which was counterbalanced across participants. Maintenance data were collected after each script was mastered and after the study ended. Results revealed that 3 persons with aphasia (PWA) demonstrated mastery of 2-3 scripts each using V+W script training methods, but only 1 participant maintained script accuracy at 16 weeks post-study. More research is needed to explore the role of written and verbal cues on script mastery and generalization.

Le présent mémoire vise à unifier les résultats d’études comportementales, neuropsychologiques et électrophysiologiques disponibles quant à la possibilité d’un partage des ressources neuronales dédiées au traitement du langage et de la musique. Pour ce faire, une analyse théorique précise des aspects traités lors de l’intégration structurale et temporelle d’éléments langagiers ou musicaux en processus de traitement en temps réel est essentielle. Le but visé est de se questionner sur l’effet potentiel d’un entraînement musical et linguistique sur les capacités syntaxiques touchées dans l’agrammatisme chez la population aphasique (Broca). / The present thesis aims at the unification of the results suggested by behavioral, neuropsychological and electrophysiological studies on the possible relation between neural correlates dedicated to treatment of language and music. To do this, a theoretical analysis of specific aspects processed in the structural and temporal integration of linguistic or musical elements when being processed on-line is essential. Our goal is to question whether a musical training would benefit the aphasic population (Broca) with agrammatism, especially on processing syntactic structures.

Le présent mémoire vise à unifier les résultats d’études comportementales, neuropsychologiques et électrophysiologiques disponibles quant à la possibilité d’un partage des ressources neuronales dédiées au traitement du langage et de la musique. Pour ce faire, une analyse théorique précise des aspects traités lors de l’intégration structurale et temporelle d’éléments langagiers ou musicaux en processus de traitement en temps réel est essentielle. Le but visé est de se questionner sur l’effet potentiel d’un entraînement musical et linguistique sur les capacités syntaxiques touchées dans l’agrammatisme chez la population aphasique (Broca). / The present thesis aims at the unification of the results suggested by behavioral, neuropsychological and electrophysiological studies on the possible relation between neural correlates dedicated to treatment of language and music. To do this, a theoretical analysis of specific aspects processed in the structural and temporal integration of linguistic or musical elements when being processed on-line is essential. Our goal is to question whether a musical training would benefit the aphasic population (Broca) with agrammatism, especially on processing syntactic structures.

正常人的語誤中可以取得在心理語言上何為音韻單位的證據，近來有許多針對失語症的病人語誤的研究，發現失語症病人的語誤也可當做測試語言表徵的重要來源資料。 　　本研究針對失語症病人在聲調方面表現，做聲調錯誤頻率分佈、語境影響錯誤、以及錯誤方向種類之分析 然後將整失語症病人聲調表現的分析跟心理語言學語言產出機制作連結。 　　本研究結果顯示，漢語失語症病人聲調表現上第四生錯誤雖然最多，但第四聲在漢語裡原本出現的頻率就最高，所以第四聲不應被認為對失語症病人最為困難。而第三聲雖然在漢語裡出現頻率最低，卻佔了失語症病人聲調錯誤頻率第二高位，因此我們判斷第三聲對失語症病人來說是最為困難的聲調。第二，我們發現漢語失語症病人聲調錯誤受語境影響比正常人低。第三，漢語失語症病人聲調錯誤裡，語境影響語誤之方向性中，錯誤來源在語誤出現前類型較多。第四，我們發現Dell的連續模型(connectionist model)，可以解釋失語症病人在聲調錯誤類型偏好原因。 / Naturally occurring speech errors have been used as evidence for testing the psychological reality of phonological units. A number of researchers start to look at evidence from aphasic speech for testing linguistic representation so the phenomena of aphasia provide tests of the validity of certain aspects of linguistic theory. 　　In this thesis, tone errors made by aphasics were examined and related overall analyses to psycholinguistic models of speech production. In light of the analysis of tone frequency in Mandarin written texts and oral data and tone errors produced by aphasics, relating issues concerning the research questions we put forward were elucidated. First, it seems that tone 4 is the most problematic tone for the aphasics in terms of error rate since tone 4 occurs the most often in errors. However, tone 4 errors intrinsically will occur more that other three tones because of its highest incidence in Mandarin. Thus, tone 4 may not be taken as the most difficult tone for aphasics merely from its high error rate. Second, the results indicated that non-contextual errors constitute most of the aphasic errors. Third, it has been shown that perseveration is a cross-linguistic feature of aphasia. Fourth, Dell’s connectionist model is proved to be able to account for and make predictions about the error patterns found in both aphasic and normal speech.