Characteristics of Polysyllabic Word Repetitions in Individuals with Fluent and Nonfluent Aphasia

Cannito, Michael P. and Strauss Hough, Monica and Dressler, Richard and Buder, Eugene H. (2013) Characteristics of Polysyllabic Word Repetitions in Individuals with Fluent and Nonfluent Aphasia. [Clinical Aphasiology Paper]

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Abstract

Speech sound errors associated with aphasia have been attributed to disintegration of both phonologic and motoric processes in different subtypes of aphasia (Pierce, 2001). In nonfluent aphasia (NA), which often co-occurs with apraxia of speech (AOS), motor programming and motor planning difficulties are the typically proposed error generating mechanisms. In contrast, phonemic paraphasia observed in fluent aphasia (FA) is typically thought to be related to inability to retrieve and maintain sequences of phonemes for production. Distortion errors, indicative of motor programming deficiency, predominate in AOS; but also have been reported to a lesser extent in FA, in studies involving word or sentence repetition (McNeil, Robin & Schmidt, 2009; Odell, McNeil, Rosenbek & Hunter 1991; Odell, Bonkowski, & Mello,1995). Associated features of dysfluency and dysprosody have also been reported in AOS (Kent & Rosenbek, 1983). In contrast, undistorted phonemic level errors also occur in both FA and NA subtypes (Blumstien, 1973; Pierce, 2001). This study examines the occurrence of phonemic errors as well as phonetic distortion, dysfluency and dysprosody in speech produced by individuals diagnosed with NA with AOS versus FA with phonemic paraphasia, in comparison with the speech of non-aphasic control speakers. This information is important (1) in order to advance our understanding of AOS, which usually occurs, clinically, in the presence of NA; (2) to further elucidate the role of distortion in FA, wherein speech errors are often described clinically as being fluently produced with little effort or distortion (Seddoh, Robin, Hageman, Moon, & Folkins, 1996); and (3) to help toward differentiating phonological/representational impairments from motorically based aspects of apraxic speech, which may not be mutually exclusive (Ziegler, Aichert & Staiger, 2012).

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