Attentional Blink Effects of Linguistic and Non-Linguistic Stimuli in Aphasia

Abstract

Aphasia literature has shown that aphasia is not a loss of language, but an impairment in the language processing system. Recent literature has suggested this breakdown in language performance must be explained by underlying cognitive mechanisms involved in accessing the representations and not the loss of the language information itself. The attentional mechanism has been suggested to fulfill the criteria of this impaired cognitive mechanism that could account for the deficits experienced by people with aphasia (PWA). An attentional blink (AB) task was used to gain further understanding of the role of the attentional mechanism in PWA as compared with neurotypical adults, in both linguistic and non-linguistic conditions. Analysis conducted investigated the strength, magnitude, and length of AB across participants and time intervals of stimulus presentation. Analysis revealed no significant differences between groups or conditions, likely due to small sample size and limited data points. Despite limitations, patterns observed showed that PWA had a tendency to higher susceptibility to AB than neurotypical participants, suggesting that it may be useful to continue investigating the relationship between attention and both linguistic and non-linguistic processing in PWA.