Search

Purpose The aim of this study was to investigate how different types of background noise that differ in their level of linguistic content affect speech acoustics, speech fluency, and language production for young adult speakers when performing a monologue discourse task. Method Forty young adults monologued by responding to open-ended questions in a silent baseline and five background noise conditions (debate, movie dialogue, contemporary music, classical music, and pink noise). Measures related to speech acoustics (intensity and frequency), speech fluency (speech rate, pausing, and disfluencies), and language production (lexical, morphosyntactic, and macrolinguistic structure) were analyzed and compared across conditions. Participants also reported on which conditions they perceived as more distracting. Results All noise conditions resulted in some change to spoken language compared with the silent baseline. Effects on speech acoustics were consistent with expected changes due to the Lombard effect (e.g., increased intensity and fundamental frequency). Effects on speech fluency showed decreased pausing and increased disfluencies. Several background noise conditions also seemed to interfere with language production. Conclusions Findings suggest that young adults present with both compensatory and interference effects when speaking in noise. Several adjustments may facilitate intelligibility when noise is present and help both speaker and listener maintain attention on the production. Other adjustments provide evidence that background noise eliciting linguistic interference has the potential to degrade spoken language even for healthy young adults, because of increased cognitive demands.

Purpose Because people with aphasia (PWA) frequently interact with partners who are unresponsive to their communicative attempts, we investigated how partner responsiveness affects quantitative measures of spoken language and subjective reactions during story retell. Method A quantitative study and a qualitative study were conducted. In Study 1, participants with aphasia and controls retold short stories to a communication partner who indicated interest through supportive backchannel responses (responsive) and another who indicated disinterest through unsupportive backchannel responses (unresponsive). Story retell accuracy, delivery speed, and ratings of psychological stress were measured and compared. In Study 2, participants completed semistructured interviews about their story retell experience, which were recorded, transcribed, and coded using qualitative analysis software. Results Quantitative results revealed increased psychological stress and decreased delivery speed across all participant groups during the unresponsive partner condition. Effects on delivery speed were more consistent for controls than participants with aphasia. Qualitative results revealed that participants with aphasia were more attuned to unresponsive partner behaviors than controls and reported stronger and more frequent emotional reactions. Partner responsiveness also affected how PWA perceived and coped with the communication experience. Conclusions Combined quantitative and qualitative findings suggest that, while unresponsive communication partners may not have robust effects on spoken language, they elicit strong emotional reactions from PWA and affect their communication experience. These findings support the need for communication partner training and suggest that training PWA on emotion regulation or relaxation techniques may help assuage their anxiety during socially challenging everyday communication and increase social participation. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.11368028

Purpose Slowed speech and interruptions to the flow of connected speech are common in aphasia. These features are also observed during dual-task performance for neurotypical adults. The purposes of this study were to determine (a) whether indices of fluency related to cognitive–linguistic versus motor processing would differ between speakers with aphasia plus apraxia of speech (AOS) and speakers with aphasia only and (b) whether cognitive load reduces fluency in speakers with aphasia with and without AOS. Method Fourteen speakers with aphasia (7 with AOS) and 7 neurotypical controls retold short stories alone (single task) and while simultaneously distinguishing between a high and a low tone (dual task). Their narrative samples were analyzed for speech fluency according to sample duration, speech rate, pause/fill time, and repetitions per syllable. Results As expected, both speaker groups with aphasia spoke slower and with more pauses than the neurotypical controls. The speakers with AOS produced more repetitions and longer samples than controls, but they did not differ on these measures from the speakers with aphasia without AOS. Relative to the single-task condition, the dual-task condition increased the duration of pauses and fillers for all groups but reduced speaking rate only for the control group. Sample duration and frequency of repetitions did not change in response to cognitive load. Conclusions Speech output in aphasia becomes less fluent when speakers have to engage in simultaneous tasks, as is typical in everyday conversation. Although AOS may lead to more sound and syllable repetitions than normal, speaking tasks other than narrative discourse might better capture this specific type of disfluency. Future research is needed to confirm and expand these preliminary findings. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.8847845

Purpose This study was intended to document speech recovery for 1 person with acquired apraxia of speech quantitatively and on the basis of her lived experience. Method The second author sustained a traumatic brain injury that resulted in acquired apraxia of speech. Over a 2-year period, she documented her recovery through 22 video-recorded monologues. We analyzed these monologues using a combination of auditory perceptual, acoustic, and qualitative methods. Results Recovery was evident for all quantitative variables examined. For speech sound production, the recovery was most prominent during the first 3 months, but slower improvement was evident for many months. Measures of speaking rate, fluency, and prosody changed more gradually throughout the entire period. A qualitative analysis of topics addressed in the monologues was consistent with the quantitative speech recovery and indicated a subjective dynamic relationship between accuracy and rate, an observation that several factors made speech sound production variable, and a persisting need for cognitive effort while speaking. Conclusions Speech features improved over an extended time, but the recovery trajectories differed, indicating dynamic reorganization of the underlying speech production system. The relationship among speech dimensions should be examined in other cases and in population samples. The combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis methods offers advantages for understanding clinically relevant aspects of recovery.