Aphasia and accent in identifying medical sentences.

The objective of this quasi-experimental pilot study was to assess the effect that the presence of aphasia in participants and the presence of an accent in speakers had on the accurate identification of 30 medical sentences. 20 participants, 10 with aphasia and 10 age- and sex-matched adults without aphasia, pointed to printed medical sentences matching utterances produced in English by native and nonnative English speakers. Analysis showed participants with aphasia had significantly lower identification scores than participants without aphasia. Across speakers' languages, scores for sentences produced by the native English speaker were significantly higher than scores for the nonnative English speakers. No interaction effects occurred. Investigations should continue to explore the effect of acquired language disorders on the understanding of accented speech.