The Effect of Musical Cues on the Nonpurposive Speech of Persons with Aphasia

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to ascertain if the influence of musical cues could benefit individuals with aphasia in their ability to recall previously-learned song lyrics. The relationship between the subjects' speech production and their age, length of time since onset of injury, type of speech disorder, and severity of speech disorder was also examined. Twelve subjects who had been diagnosed with unilateral left hemisphere cerebrovascular accidents and aphasia participated in the study. A repeated-measures design was used to examine the difference in speech production between three experimental conditions: verbal production only, verbal production with rhythm, and verbal production with melody. The subjects' speech samples were analyzed according to the following variables: speech content, error types, and number of intelligible words per minute. An analysis of variance revealed no significant differences between conditions in the subjects' speech content or error types. However, a significant difference in verbal intelligibility was found between conditions, with the verbal condition having the highest intelligibility (p = .02). A significant relationship was discovered between the subjects' severity of speech disorder and meaningful speech content (p = .003), percentage of jargon (p = .008) and intelligibility (p = .005), as well as a significant relationship between the subjects' age and speech content (p = .01).