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Brigham Young University

Theses and Dissertations

Theses/Dissertations

Aphasia

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Speech-Language Pathologists' Perspectives On Working With Couples Impacted By Aphasia, Jannelyse Allred Jun 2024

Speech-Language Pathologists' Perspectives On Working With Couples Impacted By Aphasia, Jannelyse Allred

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores speech-language pathologists' (SLPs) perceptions of, experiences with, and perceived barriers to providing psychosocial support to couples impacted by aphasia. A survey was conducted, with 50 responses analyzed. All participants were licensed SLPs who work in the United States and have people with aphasia (PWA) on their caseload. Participants responded to a portion of survey questions, viewed five short videos of Relationship-Centered Communication Partner Training (RC-CPT), then answered a portion of repeated questions to measure the change in perceived confidence, comfort, knowledge, and experience. Results indicate that SLPs perceive counseling to be within their scope of practice and …


Speech Prosody In People With Non-Fluent Aphasia: A Descriptive Study Of Between And Within Utterance Pause, Makayla Brielle Newcombe Jun 2024

Speech Prosody In People With Non-Fluent Aphasia: A Descriptive Study Of Between And Within Utterance Pause, Makayla Brielle Newcombe

Theses and Dissertations

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 …


Marriage And Family Therapists' Perspectives Of Working With Couples Impacted By Aphasia: General Perceptions And Response To Relationship-Centered Communication Partner Training, Madison Rae Christensen Mar 2024

Marriage And Family Therapists' Perspectives Of Working With Couples Impacted By Aphasia: General Perceptions And Response To Relationship-Centered Communication Partner Training, Madison Rae Christensen

Theses and Dissertations

The psychosocial needs of couples impacted by aphasia are often unmet. Sixty-one marriage and family therapists' (MFTs) experiences, perceived knowledge, confidence, comfort, and barriers in working with couples impacted by aphasia, and their interactions with speech-language pathologists (SLPs) were investigated using survey methodology. All MFTs were licensed, practicing in the US, and had at least 3 years of experience. Participants completed the following in order: (a) a pre-intervention survey, (b) one of two intervention conditions, and (c) a post-intervention survey. Twenty-eight respondents were randomly assigned to an education-alone intervention and 33 respondents were assigned to an education plus Relationship-Centered Communication …


Measuring The Effects Of Selective And Divided Attention Conditions On Language Production: Comparing Across Age Groups For Aphasia Assessment, Emily Mcdonald Mar 2024

Measuring The Effects Of Selective And Divided Attention Conditions On Language Production: Comparing Across Age Groups For Aphasia Assessment, Emily Mcdonald

Theses and Dissertations

This study was divided into two parts. Study 1 examined the spoken language production of neurologically healthy adults (NHA) in selective and divided attention conditions during a story retell task. NHA participant groups consisted of 21 younger (26–54), 19 older (55–69), and 20 elderly (70–85) adults. Study 2 investigated how the language production of four people with aphasia (PWA) compared to their respective NHA group. All participants retold stories in a silent baseline condition, three background noise conditions (cocktail party, conversation, phone call), and one dual-task condition (tone discrimination). Language production measures (speech rate, disfluent verbalizations, language efficiency, lexical diversity, …


The Acceptability Of Relationship-Centered Communication Partner Training For Couples Impacted By Aphasia: A Mixed Methods Pilot Study, Kathryn-Anne Pertab Aug 2023

The Acceptability Of Relationship-Centered Communication Partner Training For Couples Impacted By Aphasia: A Mixed Methods Pilot Study, Kathryn-Anne Pertab

Theses and Dissertations

This study explored the acceptability of Relationship-Centered Communication Partner Training (RC-CPT) for couples impacted by aphasia. Three couples participated in the program across two sessions. Surveys were administered to assess outcome measures of their marital relationship and communication confidence before and after participation in RC-CPT. The quantitative findings were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Overall, participants generally maintained or experienced improvements in accessibility, responsiveness, engagement, conflict, conflict resolution, and communication within their marriage after participating in RC-CPT. Additionally, individuals with aphasia demonstrated enhanced communication confidence scores. During the third session, couples completed a semi-structured interview to share their experiences with the …


Quantifying Speech Pause Durations In Typical English Speakers, John Hoffer Jun 2023

Quantifying Speech Pause Durations In Typical English Speakers, John Hoffer

Theses and Dissertations

This study examines filled and unfilled pause durations between utterances in the speech of 60 people with no language disorder. It also evaluates the proportions of different pause lengths, examines the location of pauses within an isolated speech sample, and compares speech pause in male speakers and female speakers. Using speech samples gathered from a picture description task, Praat acoustic analysis software was used to segment C-units and measure pause duration between utterances (Boersma & Weenink, 2022; Öktem et al., 2021). Descriptive statistics were used to analyze these data, including pause duration mean and standard deviations. Pause mean durations ranged …


The Impact Of Speech Pause On The Perceived Effectiveness And Likability Of A Speaker's Communication, Rebecca Lyman Apr 2023

The Impact Of Speech Pause On The Perceived Effectiveness And Likability Of A Speaker's Communication, Rebecca Lyman

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine how length and location of speech pausing affects a listeners' perception of likability and communication effectiveness. Furthermore, the end goal of this study is to understand how to better assess atypical speech pause for persons with aphasia (PWA). Speech samples were collected from two neurotypical speakers over the age of 75. The speech samples were the recorded responses of picture description tasks found in the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) and the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE). These speech samples were then modified to include artificial pauses located both within sentence and between …


Speech Pause In People With Aphasia Across Word Length, Frequency, And Syntactic Category, Lana Mitchell Jun 2022

Speech Pause In People With Aphasia Across Word Length, Frequency, And Syntactic Category, Lana Mitchell

Theses and Dissertations

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 …


An Exploratory Study Of Behavioral Engagement In People With And Without Aphasia: Comparisons And Relationships, Vivian Elisabeth Ward Jun 2022

An Exploratory Study Of Behavioral Engagement In People With And Without Aphasia: Comparisons And Relationships, Vivian Elisabeth Ward

Theses and Dissertations

Previous research suggests that attentional deficits could be the underlying cause of language impairments in people with aphasia (PWA) and that behavioral engagement ratings can be an accurate way to measure attention to specific tasks. Previous research also suggests that PWA have lower levels of behavioral engagement than neurologically healthy adults. Participants in the present study included 9 PWA and 18 neurologically healthy adults. This was an exploratory study investigating the relationships and differences between behavioral engagement and physiological measures, perceived arousal, and naming accuracy and response time in PWA and neurologically healthy adults. Participants completed a confrontational naming task …


Effects Of Background Noise On The Speech Acoustics Of People With Aphasia, Kirsten Dixon Aug 2021

Effects Of Background Noise On The Speech Acoustics Of People With Aphasia, Kirsten Dixon

Theses and Dissertations

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 …


The Impact Of Background Noise On The Spoken Language Of People With Mild To Moderate Aphasia: A Preliminary Investigation, Brenna Delyn Scadden Aug 2021

The Impact Of Background Noise On The Spoken Language Of People With Mild To Moderate Aphasia: A Preliminary Investigation, Brenna Delyn Scadden

Theses and Dissertations

This study examined how different background noise conditions affected the spoken language production of people with aphasia (PWA) when performing a story retell task. Participants included 11 adults with mild to moderate aphasia and 11 age- and gender-matched controls. Participants retold stories in a silent baseline and five background noise conditions (conversation, monologue, phone call, cocktail, pink noise). Dependent measures of speech fluency and language production measures (correct information units, lexical errors, lexical diversity, and cohesive utterances) were compared between groups and across conditions. Results reveal that background noise results in significantly lower communication efficiency (i.e., correct information units) for …


The Perceived Effect Of Pause Length And Location On Speaker Likability And Communicative Effectiveness, Julia M. Price Jul 2021

The Perceived Effect Of Pause Length And Location On Speaker Likability And Communicative Effectiveness, Julia M. Price

Theses and Dissertations

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 …


Physiological Arousal, Emotion, And Word Retrieval In Aphasia: Effects And Relationships, Angela Lynne Johnson Jun 2021

Physiological Arousal, Emotion, And Word Retrieval In Aphasia: Effects And Relationships, Angela Lynne Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

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 …


Quantifying Speech Pause Durations In Speakers With Nonfluent And Fluent Aphasia, Brooke K. Thomas Apr 2021

Quantifying Speech Pause Durations In Speakers With Nonfluent And Fluent Aphasia, Brooke K. Thomas

Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates pause duration between and within utterances in the speech of 20 people with different degrees and types of aphasia: 15 with fluent aphasia and five with nonfluent aphasia. It also examines within utterance pause durations as a function of utterance position. Using aphasia speech samples collected in a previous study by Harmon (2018), Praat acoustic analysis software was used to segment words and periods of pause and measure pause duration within and between utterances. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, including pause duration mean, standard deviations, and interquartile range. Speech pauses were also categorized by the …


Effects Of Positive And Negative Emotional Valence On Response Timeduring A Confrontational Naming Task: Findings From People With Aphasia And Young Adults, Corinne Jones Loveridge Jun 2020

Effects Of Positive And Negative Emotional Valence On Response Timeduring A Confrontational Naming Task: Findings From People With Aphasia And Young Adults, Corinne Jones Loveridge

Theses and Dissertations

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 …


Effect Of Positive And Negative Emotion On Naming Accuracy In Adults With Aphasia, Courtney Paige Nielsen Jun 2020

Effect Of Positive And Negative Emotion On Naming Accuracy In Adults With Aphasia, Courtney Paige Nielsen

Theses and Dissertations

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 …