Abstract

This study examines the connection between speech pause patterns and the lexical characteristics of the words that follow. Speech samples of 16 people with moderate Broca's aphasia and 16 age-matched neurologically healthy controls were evaluated in terms of word length, word frequency in the English language, syntactic category, and articulatory complexity. In general, people with aphasia (PWA) produced pauses more frequently before monosyllabic, very high frequency words with lower articulatory complexity, most of which were content words. The length of these pauses did not significantly correlate with any of the lexical factors examined in this study. The control group had similar results, producing most of their pauses before monosyllabic, very high frequency words with lower articulatory complexity; with the exception that more of their pauses preceded function words. Controls also had significant positive correlation between pause duration and word frequency, and negative correlation between pause duration and articulatory complexity. While this study did not find significant correlations between pause length and lexical factors for PWA, these findings contribute to the general knowledge of prosodic behavior of PWA, which will be useful in designing future clinical treatments for PWA.

Degree

College and Department

David O. McKay School of Education; Communication Disorders

Rights

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