Cohesive and coherent connected speech deficits in mild stroke

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Psychology

Background:

• Spoken language production relies on prelinguistic conceptual preparation for cohesive and coherent speech.
• Cohesion and coherence link sentences to prior ideas and the main topic, potentially involving broader cognitive mechanisms.

Purpose of the Study:

• To determine if stroke patients without aphasia have impairments in connected speech cohesion and coherence.
• To investigate the influence of attention and executive functions on connected speech production in stroke survivors.

Main Methods:

• Eighteen stroke patients (8 right hemisphere stroke [RHS], 6 left hemisphere stroke [LHS]) and 21 healthy controls completed narrative tasks.
• Connected speech was analyzed for within- and between-sentence processing, cohesion, and coherence.

Main Results:

• Stroke patients, particularly RHS patients, exhibited impairments in cohesion and coherence compared to controls.
• Executive functions (verbal initiation/suppression) and attention correlated with fewer errors in propositional repetition and global coherence.

Conclusions:

• Stroke patients without aphasia can present with connected speech deficits, especially in cohesion and coherence.
• Attention and executive functions appear to play a crucial role in the early conceptual preparation stages of connected speech production.