Coping Resources, Perceived Stress, and Life Experiences in Individuals with Aphasia

Individuals with certain forms of aphasia may be under considerable stress related to their linguistic skills. The current study explored coping resources, perceived stress, and life experiences in individuals with aphasia. The relation of these factors to salivary cortisol, a physiologic index of stress, was additionally investigated. Results indicate individuals with aphasia have fewer coping resources and greater perceived stress than healthy controls. Salivary cortisol was not related to perceived stress or coping resources, but was related to life experiences during the previous six months. Clinical and theoretical implications are discussed

Perceived stress and depression in stroke patients with and without aphasia

Therefore, the purpose of the current study is to determine whether perceived stress, neurological functioning, and depressive symptoms are associated in a sample of left hemisphere stroke patients with aphasia (LH) and right hemisphere stroke patients without aphasia (RH). We also explore change over time in these measures

Digit Span in Individuals with Aphasia and Right Hemisphere Damage

Although there is evidence that individuals with aphasia (IWA) have a reduced working memory capacity, there is disagreement amongst researchers as to the most appropriate measure of working memory in this population. This study explores performance on forward and backward digit span tasks in IWA and individuals with right brain damage (RBD). Findings indicate IWA perform worse on forward digit span than do RBD, however, there is no difference in performance between the two groups on the backward digit span task. Clinical and theoretical implications are discussed

Coping Resources in Individuals with Aphasia

Laures-Gore, Hammilton, and Matheny (2007) found that individuals with aphasia (IWA) have greater perceived stress and fewer perceived coping resources to deal with stressors than healthy controls. The present study further explores this finding by examining which coping resources are most affected in IWA. The perceived coping resources of confidence, social support, financial freedom, stress monitoring, tension control, and acceptance in IWA were compared to right brain damage and healthy individuals. IWA differed from these groups in the areas of perceived confidence, stress monitoring, tension control, and acceptance. Clinical implications are discussed

Cortisol over time in stroke patients and its relation with language change

The current study explored the interplay between stroke, language, and the stress biomarker, cortisol, in individuals with aphasia (IWA) and individuals with right brain damage (RBD). Nineteen IWA following a left-hemisphere stroke and 12 RBD participants began the study between one to six months post-stroke and were followed for three months. Language skills were assessed monthly; afternoon salivary cortisol samples were collected biweekly. Individuals with aphasia showed improvements in language test scores, however, language was not associated with afternoon salivary cortisol levels.  The RBD group demonstrated fairly unchanging test scores, but naming ability did relate to salivary cortisol levels

Neurogenic foreign accent syndrome: Articulatory setting, segments and prosody in a Dutch speaker

Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) can be defined as a motor speech disorder in which patients develop a speech accent which is notably different from their premorbid habitual accent. This paper aims to provide an explicit description of the neurolinguistic and phonetic characteristics of a female speaker of Belgian Dutch who suffered from neurogenic FAS in which she developed a French/German foreign accent after a left hemisphere stroke. A detailed phonetic analysis of the speaker’s pronunciation errors revealed problems at both the segmental and suprasegmental level. At the segmental level a wide variety of pronunciation errors were observed which are consistent with a tense articulatory setting: creaky voice, strengthening of fricatives into stops and more carefully articulated consonants and vowels. The data suggest that the perception of the French accent may have resulted from a combination of speech pathology features and unaffected regional pronunciation characteristics of the patient’s Standard Dutch. In contrast to the traditional view in the literature that FAS represents a primary dysprosodic disturbance, a detailed analysis of the speaker’s intonation contours by means of the stylization method revealed the entirely correct implementation of the most common pitch contours of Standard Dutch. This unique finding shows that FAS does not by definition follow from disruption of prosodic processing. However, the frequency of occurrence of the different types of pitch contours was clearly deviant since the patient very frequently used the Dutch continuation rise. It is hypothesized that this might represent a deliberate strategy of the speaker to stay in control of the speaking situation by keeping the speaking turn which she is at continuous risk of losing as the result of long and frequent pausing

Perceptual accent rating and attribution in psychogenic FAS: some further evidence challenging Whitaker's operational definition

A 40-year-old, non-aphasic, right-handed, and polyglot (L1: French, L2: Dutch, L3: English) woman with a 12 year history of addiction to opiates and psychoactive substances, and clear psychiatric problems, presented with a foreign accent of sudden onset in L1. Speech evolved towards a mostly fluent output, despite a stutter-like behavior and a marked grammatical output disorder. The psychogenic etiology of the accent foreignness was construed based upon the patient’s complex medical history, and psychodiagnostic, neuropsychological, and neurolinguistic assessments. The presence of a foreign accent was affirmed by a perceptual accent rating and attribution experiment. It is argued that this patient provides additional evidence demonstrating the outdatedness of Whitaker’s (1982) definition of Foreign Accent Syndrome, as only one of the four operational criteria was unequivocally applicable to our patient: her accent foreignness was not only recognized by her relatives and the medical staff, but also by a group of native French-speaking laymen. However, our patient defied the three remaining criteria, as central nervous system damage could not conclusively be demonstrated, psychodiagnostic assessment raised the hypothesis of a conversion disorder, and the patient was a polyglot whose newly gained accent was associated with a range of foreign languages, which exceeded the ones she spoke

Psychogenic Foreign Accent Syndrome: A New Case

This paper presents the case of a 33-year-old, right-handed, French-speaking Belgian lady who was involved in a car accident as a pedestrian. Six months after the incident she developed a German/Flemish-like accent. The patient's medical history, the onset of the FAS and the possible psychological causes of the accent change are analyzed. Relevant neuropsychological, neurolinguistic, and psychodiagnostic test results are presented and discussed. The psychodiagnostic interview and testing will receive special attention, because these have been underreported in previous FAS case reports. Furthermore, an accent rating experiment was carried out in order to assess the foreign quality of the patient's speech. Pre- and post-morbid spontaneous speech samples were analyzed phonetically to identify the pronunciation characteristics associated with this type of FAS. Several findings were considered essential in the diagnosis of psychogenic FAS: the psychological assessments as well as the clinical interview confirmed the presence of psychological problems, while neurological damage was excluded by means of repeated neuroimaging and neurological examinations. The type and nature of the speech symptoms and the accent fluctuations associated with the patient's psychological state cannot be explained by a neurological disorder. Moreover, the indifference of the patient toward her condition may also suggest a psychogenic etiology, as the opposite is usually observed in neurogenic FAS patients

Foreign accent syndrome as a psychogenic disorder: A review

© 2016 Keulen, Verhoeven, De Witte, De Page, Bastiaanse and Mariën. In the majority of cases published between 1907 and 2014, FAS is due to a neurogenic etiology. Only a few reports about FAS with an assumed psychogenic origin have been published. The present article discusses the findings of a careful database search on psychogenic FAS. This review may be particularly relevant as it is the first to analyze the salient features of psychogenic FAS cases to date. This article hopes to pave the way for the view that psychogenic FAS is a cognate of neurogenic FAS. It is felt that this variant of FAS may have been underreported, as most of the psychogenic cases have been published after the turn of the century. This review may improve the diagnosis of the syndrome in clinical practice and highlights the importance of recognizing psychogenic FAS as an independent taxonomic entity