Semantic relatedness and the cocktail party problem in aphasia: A hybrid remote/in-lab study

Abstract

ABSTRACT Background Previous work has found that individuals with aphasia demonstrate impaired performance, relative to controls, on listening tasks where target speech is masked by other intelligible speech (Villard & Kidd, 2019). While this deficit may be due in part to impaired cognitive skills (e.g., attention, memory), the current study examined whether impaired linguistic-semantic processing could be a contributing factor as well. Aims This study compared the effect of semantic relatedness between target and masker words on performance on a speech-on-speech masking task, in listeners with aphasia vs. age-matched controls. Additionally, the study compared performance on a remote vs. an in-lab version of the experiment, with the goal of establishing the validity of remote listening experiments in these populations. Methods & Procedures Eight persons with aphasia (PWA) and eight age-matched controls (AMC) participated in the remote version of the experiment; similarly, eight PWA and eight AMC participated in the in-lab version of the experiment. In both versions, participants listened to short target sentences while ignoring maskers. Maskers consisted of either intelligible speech from the same semantic category as the target (e.g., target and maskers were all fruits), intelligible speech from a distant semantic category from the target (e.g., target was a fruit; maskers were articles of clothing), or speech-shaped, speech envelope-modulated noise. Procedures and stimuli were kept as similar as possible between the remote and in-lab versions of the experiment. Outcomes & Results In-lab results revealed a significant effect of group, such that PWA performed more poorly than AMC, as well as a significant effect of masking condition, such that participants performed more poorly on speech masking vs. noise masking conditions. No significant differences between same-category and different-category maskers were observed. A comparison of remote vs. in-lab results revealed similar patterns of performance between the two settings but suggested that remote testing resulted in overall noisier data. Conclusions These findings add to the existing body of knowledge about auditory masking in aphasia. Furthermore, they help lead to a clearer understanding of barriers to social engagement and community participation in PWA by characterizing challenges associated with communicating in noisy settings. The study also provided qualified support for the use of remote testing paradigms for listening experiments.