Oral Reading Prosody and Comprehension in Persons With Aphasia: A Preliminary Investigation

This study acoustically characterized the oral reading prosody of persons with aphasia (PWA) and neurotypical controls for a connected text and aimed to determine which prosodic features were most associated with performance on a reading comprehension task.

Six PWA and six neurotypical, age- and education-matched controls participated in this preliminary study. Participants read Paragraph 3 of the Gray Oral Reading Tests-Fifth Edition aloud and subsequently answered five comprehension questions. A total of 11 measures related to phrasing, intonation, and expressivity were extracted using Praat for each participant in order for comparisons to be made across participant groups and associations examined with reading comprehension scores.

The Mann-Whitney U test suggested a significant difference between PWA and control participants for intersentential pause durations, pausal intrusion frequency, and duration of pausal-pausal syllables. Although statistically nonsignificant, intersentential pause duration, pausal intrusion frequency, pausal intrusion duration, duration of prepausal syllables, and intensity amplitude following a syntactic juncture were all moderately correlated (all rs > .58) with comprehension of Paragraph 3 of the Gray Oral Reading Tests-Fifth Edition in PWA. All measures were weakly correlated with comprehension for the control participants.

PWA demonstrated statistically significant longer durations for intersentential pauses and prepausal syllables, and a greater number of pausal intrusions. Interestingly, three of the five measures moderately correlated to comprehension were those that were statistically different between the two participant groups. As such, preliminary findings of this study warrant further investigation in a larger sample of PWA.