Revealing linguistic and verbal short-term and working memory abilities in people with severe aphasia

ABSTRACT

Background

The assessment of aphasia in people with severe deficits is hampered by a paucity of tests that are appropriate for this population and that are sensitive to their underlying linguistic and short-term and working memory (STM/WM) strengths and weaknesses. The Temple Assessment of Language and Short-Term Memory in Aphasia (TALSA) provides a means of assessing people with severe aphasia (PWSA).

Aims

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the sensitivity of the TALSA to the underlying linguistic and STM/WM strengths and weaknesses in PWSA. We assessed eight PWSA on selected subtests of the TALSA and found that 1) the TALSA is sensitive to the underlying linguistic and verbal STM/WM abilities of PWSA, 2) the TALSA reveals a wide variety of linguistic and verbal STM/WM profiles in PWSA and, 3) the TALSA can potentially demonstrate common patterns of performance in PWSA.

Main contributions

The TALSA allows researchers to include more PWSA in the study of aphasia and enables clinicians to establish more accurate prognoses, create precisely targeted treatment plans and document incremental progress in therapy.

Conclusions

The TALSA is an important addition to the assessment of severe aphasia. It provides an in-depth evaluation of underlying linguistic and verbal STM/WM strengths and weaknesses of PWSA.

KEYWORDS:

• Aphasia
• assessment
• severe
• global
• verbal short-term memory
• verbal working memory

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to JoAnn Silkes and Reva Zimmerman for data collection and for insightful conversations, to Kevin McCaffery for data management, and to Julie Schlesinger for thorough proofreading.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02687038.2024.2322770

Notes

1. Significance values have been adjusted by the Bonferroni correction for multiple tests and the test statistic was adjusted for ties.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders under Grant Number R01DC01924 (2017 – 2022, awarded to Martin). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.