All Theses, Dissertations, and Capstone Projects

Year of Award

2019

Degree

Master of Science (MS)

College

College of Education & Allied Health

Degree Program

Speech-Language Pathology

Department

Communication Disorders and Deaf Education

First Advisor

Amanda Eaton

Second Advisor

Carmen Russell

Third Advisor

Richard Lewis

Keywords

Aphasia, Amplification, Communication, Discourse Comprehension

Abstract

Deficits in auditory processing and comprehension can have negative impacts on everyday conversation in people with aphasia (PWA). Comprehension deficits observed in people with aphasia have been compared to individuals with auditory processing disorder (APD). Koohi and colleagues (2017) found that individuals with auditory processing disorder (APD) post-stroke benefitted from use of amplification as it related to their deficits in auditory processing. This preliminary study aims to determine if PWA will benefit from amplification on measures of comprehension and in a broader sense, use of amplification in everyday life. Nine adults with expressive aphasia and 5 neurologically normal controls were administered listening tasks with and without amplification in a structured environment. Results indicated that amplification had a small positive effect on PWA and a moderate-large positive effect on control participants, as it relates to their overall comprehension of discourse. Amplification may help to lessen the demand on processing auditory information and be a potential tool in facilitating discourse comprehension for particular PWA. Further research is needed to determine potential benefits of amplification use by PWA.

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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