Attention allocation in adults with and without aphasia: Performance on linguistic and nonlinguistic tasks

This experiment assessed attention allocation patterns of eight persons with aphasia and eight persons without aphasia using a target-detection paradigm. The participants performed a single nonlinguistic attention task (gender identification), a single linguistic attention task (word-picture match), and a dual attention task combining the two single tasks (word-picture match and/or gender identification). A repeated measures ANOVA on performance accuracy revealed no significant difference between the aphasia group and the control group. A repeated measures ANOVA on reaction time revealed significant main effects for group and task as well as a significant interaction. Post-hoc repeated t-tests revealed significant differences between the aphasia and control groups on the two linguistic tasks but not on the nonlinguistic task. Inspection of standard deviation values revealed a higher level of variability in reaction time performance for participants with aphasia than for participants without aphasia, individually and as a group.