The Effects of Varying Attentional Demands on the Word Retrieval Skills of Adults with Aphasia, Right Hemisphere Brain Damage, or No Brain Damage

Between-session and within-session intra-individual variability in attention in aphasia

“…The second of these findings aligns well with earlier findings suggesting that PWA perform more poorly in dual-task vs. single task attentional paradigms (Erickson, Goldinger, & LaPointe, 1996;Murray, Holland, & Beeson, 1997;Murray, 2000). Our results, however, add a new dimension to this discussion:…”

“…However, persons with aphasia (PWA) have consistently been found to exhibit impaired performance not only on language measures, but also on measures assessing a variety of cognitive skills, including attention (Robin & Rizzo, 1989;Tseng, McNeil, & Milenkovic, 1993;Murray, Holland, & Beeson, 1998;Murray, 2000;Hunting-Pompon, Kendall, & Moore, 2011;Murray, 2012), memory (De Renzi & Nichelli, 1975;Albert, 1976;Gainotti, Silveri, Villa, & Caltagirone, 1983;Rönnberg, Larsson, Fogelsjöö, Nilsson, Lindberg, & Ängquist, 1996;Yasuda, Nakamura, & Beckman, 2000), executive function (Glosser & Goodglass, 1990;Beeson, Bayles, Rubens, & Kaszniak, 1993;Purdy, 2002), and learning (Vallila-Rohter & Kiran, 2013). Such findings suggest that the traditional characterization of aphasia as an impairment in language processing may be incomplete.…”

“…To begin with, attention -arguably the most basic of the cognitive processes -has been found to be impaired in PWA relative to healthy controls (Robin & Rizzo, 1989;Tseng, McNeil, & Milenkovic, 1993;Erickson, Goldinger, & LaPointe, 1996;Murray, Holland, & Beeson, 1997;Murray, 2000;Hunting-Pompon, Kendall, & Moore, 2011;Murray, 2012).…”

“…Although aphasia is traditionally defined as a language impairment, persons with aphasia (PWA) have consistently been found to exhibit impaired performance on tasks measuring attention (Robin & Rizzo, 1989;Tseng, McNeil, & Milenkovic, 1993;Murray, Holland, & Beeson, 1997;Murray, 2000;HuntingPompon, Kendall, & Moore, 2011;Murray, 2012;Heuer & Hallowell, 2015).…”

Auditory comprehension and visual-manual tracking dual-task performance in aphasia: Preliminary findings

“…Consistent with this general view, language performance differences between normal and aphasic participants are typically magnified under dual-task conditions (e.g., LaPointe & Erickson, 1991;Murray, 2000;Tseng, McNeil, & Milenkovic, 1993). Resource allocation theory has also motivated the study of dual-task language performance in normal individuals, and results suggest that auditory comprehension task demands can affect concurrent visual-manual tracking performance (Granier, Robin, Shapiro, Peach, & Zimba, 2000;McNeil et al, 2004), but that tracking task difficulty has no effect on auditory comprehension performance (McNeil et al, 2004;in press).…”