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Abstract:
Murray (2000) has shown that the language of individuals with
aphasia is influenced by varying attention demands, which suggests
that attention may influence linguistic aspects of in these
individuals. Other research has supported the relationship between
aphasia and attention deficits as well (e.g., McNeil, Odell, &
Tseng, 1991; Erickson, Goldinger, & LaPointe, 1996). In the
attention literature, extinction has been studied extensively as a
deficit in attention and/or in binding due to decreased attentional
abilities. It has been demonstrated in individuals following right
hemisphere stroke in the auditory and visual modalities (Shisler,
Gore, & Baylis, 2000; Baylis, Gore, Rodriguez, & Shisler,
2000). Therefore, if individuals with left hemisphere lesions and
aphasia demonstrate extinction in the auditory modality, it could
be argued that aphasia may be related with a deficient binding
system, influenced by coexisting difficulties in attention. In this
study, individuals with left hemisphere lesions completed
extinction tasks in order to determine if there are underlying
attention deficits in the left hemisphere that could be due to
deficient binding. Tasks requiring identification and localization
(and therefore binding) of auditory stimuli were used. As
predicted, patients demonstrated decreased performance for
presentations requiring binding for double simultaneous
presentations versus single presentations. Results suggest a
possible connection between attention and binding with language
disorders in aphasia.
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