The effects of pause duration on the auditory comprehension skills of aphasic adults

The purpose of this study was to determine whether there was a significant difference in aphasic adults' responses to commands with one-fourth, two, four, six, and eight-second pause durations. Ten left hemisphere brain damaged adults were presented with five sets of prerecorded sentence stimuli. The stimuli consisted of commands containing pauses inserted between clauses. The subjects listened to each sentence, then responded by pointing to the objects presented in the sentence. The subjects' responses were scored on a scale from zero to four, in terms of the accuracy and the order of object identification.

The major result of this investigation was that there was no significant difference in performance when auditory commands were presented with varied pause durations. Although the different pause durations did not affect group performance, examination of individual subject data suggest that for some subjects there may have been improvements in performance.

A variety of factors may have influenced the results of the present investigation. Possible explanations for the results include the high level of performance among some of the subjects, the relative ease of the task, and the use of a scaled scoring system. The most likely explanation for the outcome of this study is that pauses may not be salient enough to facilitate comprehension unless they are combined with additional variables, such as decreased speaking rate or visual information, explanation is that additional pause time simply does not improve comprehension deficits. Another possible explanation is that additional pause time simply does not improve comprehension deficits.

From the results of this study, it may be concluded that the auditory comprehension skills of aphasic adults similar to those in this study are not significantly affected by pauses ranging from one-fourth to eight seconds when inserted within two-stage commands. Further research is needed to determine what variables can be used in combination with pauses in order to facilitate aphasics' auditory comprehension abilities.