To what extent does attention underlie language in aphasia?

ABSTRACT

Background: It is well established that persons with aphasia (PWA) exhibit impaired performance on assessments not only of language function but also of cognitive skills, including attention processing. Attention is a particularly important cognitive skill to examine in aphasia because of its fundamental, domain-general nature, as well as the fact that a link between attention deficits and language deficits in this population has been proposed in previous work.

Aims: We review and discuss the current understanding of attention in aphasia and offer a literature-based schema for understanding how attention may influence language in PWA.

Main Contribution: We first identify two common features of current models of attention in healthy populations, specifically, the domain-generality of attention and the existence of multiple types of attention. We then review the literature on attention in aphasia in light of these two features and discuss what the evidence in this area thus far indicates about the nature of the connection between attention and language in aphasia. Importantly, we discuss a dimension of task performance—intra-individual variability (IIV) over time—which, though relatively little studied in the context of attention in aphasia to date, may be crucial to gain a more complete understanding of PWAs’ ability to maintain consistent attention over time.

Conclusions: IIV in attention may have important implications for understanding not only attention in aphasia but also language performance and even language treatment outcomes in this population, and is therefore worthy of closer examination.

KEYWORDS:

• Aphasia
• attention
• language
• intra-individual variability
• fluctuations

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Teresa Gray, Sofia Vallila-Rohter, Jeffrey Johnson, Erin Meier, and Carrie Des Roches for their insightful comments on the ideas discussed in this review. This review was adapted from a portion of the first author's dissertation manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.