Presenters: Emily McDonald
Authors: Emily McDonald, Chloe Houghton, Tyson Harmon
Faculty Advisor: Tyson Harmon
Institution: Brigham Young University
Background Aphasia, an acquired language disorder, affects approximately two million people in the United States. For people with aphasia (PWA), language is most often assessed and treated in controlled environments, which rarely reflect the attentional demands of everyday communication (Harmon, 2020). This makes very mild deficits and outcomes that are likely to transfer to real-world contexts difficult to detect. As the first step towards integrating attentionally demanding conditions to assessment and treatment in aphasia, the present study will compare spoken language performance from two cases of mild aphasia to a normative sample of neurologically healthy adults across a variety of attentionally demanding contexts. Method Participants will retell short stories in a silent baseline condition, three background noise conditions,two timepressure conditions, a dual-task condition, and a combined dual-task/time-pressure condition. Samples will be recorded, transcribed, and then analyzed for language productivity, efficiency, micro-linguistic errors, and cohesion. We recently obtained IRB approval for this studyand plan to present preliminary data at the conference. Anticipated Results Preliminary data will include measures of speech productivity and efficiency from up to 40 neurologically healthy adults and two participants with aphasia. Previous research suggests that speech efficiency measures tend to decline in attentionally demanding conditions for PWA but remain relatively consistent for controls (Harmon et al., 2019;Scadden, 2021). The sample from the present study will be used to identify which condition provides the best differentiation of PWA from neurotypical speakers. We hypothesize that two participants with mild aphasia will show costs of one or more standard deviations below the mean on speech efficiency across all attentionally demanding conditions but that this difference will become more distinct as more complex attention is involved (e.g., dual task condition).