Abstract

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.

Degree

MS

College and Department

David O. McKay School of Education; Communication Disorders

Rights

https://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/

Date Submitted

2024-06-04

Document Type

Thesis

Handle

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/etd13254

Keywords

aphasia, pause, Broca's aphasia

Language

english

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