COMMUNICATION PARTNER ATTITUDES, SOCIAL AND COGNITIVE CHALLENGE, AND SPOKEN LANGUAGE IN APHASIA

Public Deposited
Analytics

Downloadable Content

Download PDF
Request Version for Screen Reader
Last Modified
  • March 22, 2019
Creator
  • Harmon, Tyson
    • Affiliation: School of Medicine, Department of Allied Health Sciences, Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences
Abstract
  • The purpose of these studies was to investigate how partner attitudes, attention, and emotion affect communication in aphasia. The first study investigated the attitudes of potential communication partners regarding speech output, speaker attributes and their own feelings after hearing unaltered and digitally modified samples from PWA as well as samples from speakers with no aphasia. Listeners reported less favorable attitudes about PWA than speakers with no aphasia. In addition, samples that were modified to sound more fluent caused listeners to improve their attitudes. The second study investigated the impact of cognitive and social demands on psychological stress and spoken language for PWA. Twenty-one PWA (10 moderate, 11 mild) and 12 controls retold short stories to a supportive partner, nonsupportive partner, and with a dual task (i.e., discriminating between high and low tones). Spoken language was measured in terms of content accuracy and delivery speed. Dual task communication was more detrimental to the spoken language of PWA than controls but different speed-accuracy trade-off patterns were noted for the mild and moderate aphasia groups. The effects of communicating with a nonsupportive partner varied among individual participants; there were, however, correlations between ratings of stress and story retell performance across all conditions. After retelling stories in the three experimental conditions, participants were interviewed. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed qualitatively to explore participants’ subjective reactions when communicating with nonsupportive partners and under divided attention. PWA were found to be biased toward negative stimuli and have a heightened emotional response in these situations. Social and cognitive demands also resulted in less favorable self-perceptions of their performance. To deal with these demands, participants with mild aphasia commented on using a variety of intentional strategies. Together, these studies show that the speech of PWA leads to unfavorable attitudes, which—when manifest through nonsupportive partner behaviors—results in negative emotional reactions from PWA and distorts their perception of the communication experience. Communicating with a dual task also results in negative emotions and perceptions for PWA. In addition, their spoken language significantly deteriorates. People with mild aphasia seem more capable of dealing with increased situational demands by employing strategies.
Date of publication
Keyword
DOI
Resource type
Advisor
  • Jacks, Adam
  • Haley, Katarina L.
  • Buss, Emily
  • Roth, Heidi
  • Williams, Sharon
  • Bailliard, Antoine
Degree
  • Doctor of Philosophy
Degree granting institution
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Graduation year
  • 2018
Language

Relations

Parents:

This work has no parents.

Items

Thumbnail Title Date Uploaded Visibility Actions
file details Harmon_unc_0153D_17576.pdf 2019-04-10 Public Download