What is it about?
People who survive strokes or other brain injuries often experience aphasia, defined as difficulty in understanding or producing language. As they recover, people with aphasia have to figure out how to best adapt to the changes in their language system. This paper used computational modeling to look at one type of adaptation- how well people with aphasia are able to balance speed and language during simple "lexical decision" language tasks. Overall, 40% of the people with aphasia in our study responded either too impulsively (impairing accuracy), or too cautiously (impairing processing speed). This suggests that setting the wrong balance between speed and accuracy leads to unnecessarily poor language performance in aphasia.
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Why is it important?
When people with aphasia set the wrong balance between speed and accuracy, they either make unnecessary errors or perform unnecessarily slowly. This may negatively impact their day-to-day communication ability, and may also reduce the gains made during language rehabilitation. This work offers one way carefully characterize speed-accuracy tradeoffs in individual people with aphasia, a first step in helping patients better adapt to the needs and abilities of their current language system.
Perspectives
I became interested in this issue while working clinically as a speech-language pathologist. Some of my patients with aphasia appeared overly impulsive, responding quickly and making a number of errors. When I taught these patients to slow down, their accuracy often improved. Others patients appeared overly cautious, struggling with language for much longer than appeared helpful. When I taught these patients to relax and speed up a bit (e.g., to know when to “let it go” or when try a different communication approach), they often became less frustrated and we were able to complete more practice trials during language therapy. Based on these clinical intuitions and our current modeling work, my colleagues and I are now working to develop a computer-based naming treatment game specifically designed help people with aphasia learn to more optimally balance their speed and accuracy.
Will Evans
University of Pittsburgh
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Speed–Accuracy Trade-Offs and Adaptation Deficits in Aphasia: Finding the “Sweet Spot” Between Overly Cautious and Incautious Responding, American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, March 2019, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA),
DOI: 10.1044/2018_ajslp-17-0156.
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