What is it about?
This was our third study to address the controversy about whether speech consistency helps diagnose apraxia of speech after stroke. We used a larger sample of stroke survivors than in any previous studies. As before, we examined how much word production changed when people with apraxia of speech and people with aphasia said the same words five times in a row. We measured both individual sounds and whole words.
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Why is it important?
We examined speech from 171 people with apraxia of speech and aphasia and compared results for different speech profiles. We found that those with apraxia of speech produced words with either the same or lower consistency compared to others. The results supported our earlier studies with smaller samples. We could confidently conclude that error consistency is a poor criterion for differentiating apraxia of speech from aphasia --and that it is especially true that people with apraxia of speech do not produce more consistent errors than people with aphasia.
Perspectives
It was exciting to help resolve a diagnostic controversy that has created much confusion over the years. It was helpful that we could enroll so many participants and compare very well-defined speech profiles. It is also important that we showed that some consistency measures are unstable and should be avoided.
Katarina L Haley
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Repeated word production is inconsistent in both aphasia and apraxia of speech, Aphasiology, February 2020, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/02687038.2020.1727837.
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