Boosting competition-resolution skills can help people with aphasia understand speech better.

What is it about?

Cognitive control is a competition-resolution skill that helps us detect and resolve conflicts between mental representations. In this study, we looked at how people with aphasia—a condition that affects speech and language after a stroke—deal with conflicting information. Specifically, we tested whether boosting their cognitive control could help them understand sentences with conflict better. Four people with mild aphasia did tasks where they listened to sentences and chose the picture that best matched the sentence, while we tracked their eye movements. The results showed that some people became faster and looked more often at the correct pictures when cognitive control was boosted. This suggests that cognitive control might help some people with aphasia understand speech better, though the effects varied between individuals.

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Photo by Bhautik Patel on Unsplash

Photo by Bhautik Patel on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This is the first study to show that competition-resolution skills (cognitive control) can improve sentence comprehension in aphasia. It suggests that training these skills could be a promising new treatment for some individuals with aphasia.

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