Abstract
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 aphasic group than the control group. PWA also experience background noise costs in relation to speech fluency and lexical production during both conversation and phone call conditions. The control group experience no significant background noise costs. These findings suggest that background noise interferes with discourse more for PWA than neurologically healthy adults.
Degree
MS
College and Department
David O. McKay School of Education; Communication Disorders
Rights
https://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/
BYU ScholarsArchive Citation
Scadden, Brenna DeLyn, "The Impact of Background Noise on the Spoken Language of People With Mild to Moderate Aphasia: A Preliminary Investigation" (2021). Theses and Dissertations. 9701.
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/9701
Date Submitted
2021-08-03
Document Type
Thesis
Handle
http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/etd12532
Keywords
aphasia, acoustics, language, divided attention, distraction
Language
english