Sentence Production in a Discourse Context in Latent Aphasia: A Real-Time Study

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to improve our understanding as to which factors determine online, spoken sentence production abilities of adults with latent aphasia in a discourse context. Method: Discourse samples of the story of Cinderella elicited from Aphasia-Bank were analyzed with speech analysis software. Participants comprised people with latent and anomic aphasia as well as neurotypical controls (10 per group). Durations of pauses (silent and filled) were analyzed according to (a) the location they occurred (between or within sentences), (b) the syntactic complexity of sentences (simple, complex), and (c) sentence length (number of words). Statistical comparisons were conducted using mixed-effect models. Results: The two clinical groups (latent and anomic) differed from controls in the duration of pauses, both between and within sentences. Syntactic complexity did not exert an effect on either of the two clinical groups as compared with controls. As compared with controls, both clinical groups paused more before long in comparison with short sentences. Conclusion: Reduction in processing speed, which affects the ability to simultaneously maintain multiple linguistic and other cognitive demands associated with planning and monitoring of utterances, is a major factor that compromises sentence production in spoken discourse in latent aphasia.