Abstract

Aphasia is an acquired neurogenic language disorder commonly treated by speech language pathologists (SLPs). People with aphasia (PWA) experience various language deficits which impact their ability to effectively communicate with their environment. One of these deficits which impacts individuals with non-fluent aphasia is dysprosody. The purpose of this study is to acoustically evaluate the pitch and intensity of individuals with moderate Broca's aphasia along with age and gender matched control participants across a variety of task types in order to help SLPs better understand how to effectively assess and treat prosody in PWA. This study is an extension of Pickard (2025) study and while the groups of speakers evaluated and the acoustic analyses are similar between the two studies, the specific recordings examined as well as the resulting findings are independent. This study included 16 individuals with moderate non-fluent Broca's aphasia and 16 neurologically healthy control subjects of similar ages and genders. Speech samples from the 32 participants were sourced from the AphasiaBank database and included samples across the following task types: picture description, personal narrative, personal interview, and story retell. A repeated measures using Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was calculated to determine potential differences in prosodic pitch and intensity patterns across task type. Differences as a function of aphasia status were also investigated. Results find significant differences across speech task for the dependent measures of intensity range and intensity variability. However, no interaction effects were found as a function of neurological status. Regarding pitch measures, pitch range was found to differ significantly as a function of speech task type and the aphasia status of the speaker. No other significant main effects or interactions were found for pitch or intensity as a function of speech task type or neurological status. Overall, this study contributes to the growing research on dysprosody in PWA. Further research is warranted in order to confirm the findings of the study and enhance clinical understanding of dysprosody in PWA to more effectively approach treatment and assessment of non-fluent aphasia.

Degree

College and Department

David O. McKay School of Education; Communication Disorders

Rights

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