Background: In an increasingly multicultural society, all individuals are likely to come into contact with speakers with unfamiliar accents. Recent figures suggest that such accent variation may be particularly apparent within the healthcare workforce. Research on accent variation has demonstrated that an unfamiliar speaker accent can affect listener comprehension, but the impact of speaker accent on the comprehension skills of listeners with neurological impairment has not been widely explored.
Aims: To investigate the effect of an unfamiliar accent on the sentence comprehension of individuals with aphasia following stroke.
Methods & procedures: The impact of two different accents (south-east England and Nigerian) on accuracy and response time for 16 individuals with aphasia and 16 healthy control subjects was measured. Participants were presented with a computerized sentence-to-picture matching task and their accuracy and response times were recorded.
Outcomes & results: Results showed that individuals with aphasia made significantly more errors in comprehension of sentences spoken in an unfamiliar accent than in a familiar accent, a finding that was not demonstrated by the control group when outliers were excluded. Individuals with aphasia were slower overall; however, response times did not show significant effects of speaker accent for either group.
Conclusions & implications: The impact of speaker accent should be considered in the rehabilitation of individuals with aphasia following stroke. Clinical implications include the possibility of underestimating an individual's language abilities on assessment, and the potential errors in comprehension that may occur.
© 2010 Royal College of Speech & Language Therapists.