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Let silence speak about aphasia: possible associations between pause and language related cognitive processes

Georgia Angelopoulou1*, Maria Varkanitsa2, Dimitrios Kasselimis1, 3, George Makrydakis1, Dimitrios Tsolakopoulos1, Petros Roussos4, Dionysios Goutsos5, Ioannis Evdokimidis1 and Constantin Potagas1
  • 1 National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Department of Neurology, School of Medicine, Greece
  • 2 Massachusetts General Hospital, Department of Neurology, United States
  • 3 University of Crete, Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, Greece
  • 4 National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Department of Psychology, School of Philosophy, Greece
  • 5 National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Department of Psychology, School of Philology, Greece

Introduction Pauses may be studied as an aspect of the temporal organization of speech as well as an index of internal cognitive processes associated with language, including lexical access and sentence planning (Rochester, 1973). Previous findings indicate that several neurological conditions may affect both pausing and cognitive-linguistic abilities (Mack et al., 2015; Yunusova et al., 2016). The aim of this study is to investigate possible relationships between pause duration/rate and performance on measures of lexical access in people with post-stroke aphasia (PWA). Methodology Seventeen (5 women) PWA, 40-73 years old (Mean: 56.29, SD: 8.43), with 6-20 years of formal schooling (Mean: 12.47, SD: 3.78), were recruited. Speech samples were derived from recordings of the stroke story interview during standard Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE-SF) assessment. Silent pauses were annotated using the ΕLAN program by two independent raters. Speech rate (SR: words/minute) was calculated for each participant. Neuropsychological testingfocused on lexical access and included the Boston Naming Test, semantic and phonemic fluency tasks. Pauses were log-transformed and the boundary threshold between short and long pauses was derived directly from our data. Using this threshold, pauses were tagged as short or long. We then performed correlation analyses between the derived pause variables (rate and duration for the two types of pauses) and PWA’s speech rate indices andstandardized scores on the neuropsychological measures. Results Speech rate is negatively correlated with the duration of both long and short pauses. Our results also demonstrate a significant negative correlation between speech rate and rate of long pauses (N of pauses per minute): participants with higher speech rate exhibit fewer long pauses per minute; r=-.765, p<.05.Notably, there was a marginally significant inverse association between the rate of short pauses and speech rate (r=.448, p=.072).The remaining correlation coefficients, describing relationshipsbetween scores on measures of lexical access and pause rates, separately for each pause type, failed to reach significance. Discussion Our findings suggest that the deleterious effect of the duration of silent gaps is shown to be independent of pause type. However, the analysis of pause rates yielded much more informative results. While speech rate is analogous to the rate of short pauses, there is a clear-cut inverse association pattern for long pauses, i.e. patients with reduced speech rate present with increased pause rate. Interestingly, there were no significant relationships between measures of lexical access and rate of the two types of pauses. Therefore, we corroborate the idea that the rate of long pauses may serve as an index of cognitive processes related to speech planning. In this context, the analogy between words and short pauses produced within a given time frame simply supports the notion that the increase in word production will inevitably be accompanied by an increase in short silent intervals. Overall, we suggest that long pauses reflect higher cognitive-linguistic functions, such as temporal organization of speech, something that could further be explored through pauses’ loci in relation to specific language elements.

References

Mack, J. E., Chandler, S. D., Meltzer-Asscher, A., Rogalski, E., Weintraub, S., Mesulam, M. M., & Thompson, C. K. (2015). What do pauses in narrative production reveal about the nature of word retrieval deficits in PPA? Neuropsychologia, 77, 211-222.
Rochester, S. R. (1973). The significance of pauses in spontaneous speech. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2(1), 51–81.
Yunusova, Y., Graham, N. L., Shellikeri, S., Phuong, K., Kulkarni, M., Rochon, E., Tang-Wai, D. F., Chow, T. W., Black, S. E., Zinman, L. H., & Green, J. R. (2016). Profiling Speech and Pausing in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD). PloSone, 11(1), e0147573.

Keywords: pauses, Aphasia, sentence planning, lexical access, speech rate

Conference: Academy of Aphasia 55th Annual Meeting , Baltimore, United States, 5 Nov - 7 Nov, 2017.

Presentation Type: poster presentation

Topic: General Submission

Citation: Angelopoulou G, Varkanitsa M, Kasselimis D, Makrydakis G, Tsolakopoulos D, Roussos P, Goutsos D, Evdokimidis I and Potagas C (2019). Let silence speak about aphasia: possible associations between pause and language related cognitive processes. Conference Abstract: Academy of Aphasia 55th Annual Meeting . doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2017.223.00127

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Received: 02 May 2017; Published Online: 25 Jan 2019.

* Correspondence: Mrs. Georgia Angelopoulou, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Department of Neurology, School of Medicine, Athens, Greece, georginangel@gmail.com