Self-Reported Inner Speech Reflects Improvement From Language Therapy

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Speech-Language Pathology
• Psycholinguistics

Background:

• Aphasia, a language disorder resulting from brain damage, often impairs word retrieval.
• Inner speech, defined as the subjective experience of covert lexical access, is hypothesized to play a role in language production and recovery.
• Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA) is a treatment approach aimed at improving word retrieval in individuals with aphasia.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the role of inner speech in naming recovery following SFA treatment in individuals with aphasia.
• To determine if baseline inner speech predicts treatment outcomes.
• To examine if real-time changes in inner speech are associated with naming success during and after treatment.

Main Methods:

• Eighteen individuals with poststroke aphasia underwent SFA treatment targeting 30 individualized items.
• Participants reported the presence or absence of inner speech on each naming trial.
• Logistic mixed-effects models were used to analyze the relationship between inner speech and naming accuracy, controlling for covariates.

Main Results:

• Pretreatment inner speech levels did not predict posttreatment naming accuracy.
• A significant interaction revealed that concurrent inner speech during naming trials was strongly associated with correct item naming posttreatment.
• These findings persisted after accounting for aphasia severity and psycholinguistic variables; untreated items showed minimal improvement.

Conclusions:

• Inner speech does not predict aphasia treatment outcome at baseline.
• Inner speech serves as a dynamic, real-time marker of successful lexical access during naming tasks following SFA therapy.
• The study highlights the importance of concurrent inner speech in facilitating naming recovery in individuals with aphasia.