Department of Speech and Language Therapy, Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, London, UK.
Int J Lang Commun Disord. 2011 Jan-Feb;46(1):63-73. doi: 10.3109/13682820903560294. Epub 2010 Feb 23.
In an increasingly multicultural society, all individuals are likely to come into contact with speakers with unfamiliar accents. Recent figures suggest that such accent variation may be particularly apparent within the healthcare workforce. Research on accent variation has demonstrated that an unfamiliar speaker accent can affect listener comprehension, but the impact of speaker accent on the comprehension skills of listeners with neurological impairment has not been widely explored.
To investigate the effect of an unfamiliar accent on the sentence comprehension of individuals with aphasia following stroke.
METHODS & PROCEDURES: The impact of two different accents (south-east England and Nigerian) on accuracy and response time for 16 individuals with aphasia and 16 healthy control subjects was measured. Participants were presented with a computerized sentence-to-picture matching task and their accuracy and response times were recorded.
OUTCOMES & RESULTS: Results showed that individuals with aphasia made significantly more errors in comprehension of sentences spoken in an unfamiliar accent than in a familiar accent, a finding that was not demonstrated by the control group when outliers were excluded. Individuals with aphasia were slower overall; however, response times did not show significant effects of speaker accent for either group.
CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: The impact of speaker accent should be considered in the rehabilitation of individuals with aphasia following stroke. Clinical implications include the possibility of underestimating an individual's language abilities on assessment, and the potential errors in comprehension that may occur.
在日益多元文化的社会中，所有人都可能会接触到带有不熟悉口音的说话者。最近的数据表明，这种口音差异在医疗保健工作者中可能尤为明显。口音变化的研究表明，不熟悉的说话者口音会影响听众的理解，但口音对有神经损伤的听众的理解能力的影响尚未得到广泛探讨。
调查不熟悉的口音对中风后失语症个体句子理解的影响。
测量了 16 名失语症患者和 16 名健康对照组个体对两种不同口音（英格兰东南部和尼日利亚）的准确性和反应时间的影响。参与者接受了计算机化的句子-图片匹配任务，记录了他们的准确性和反应时间。
结果表明，与熟悉的口音相比，失语症个体在理解不熟悉口音的句子时犯了明显更多的错误，而对照组在排除离群值后则没有表现出这种情况。失语症个体的总体反应速度较慢；然而，对于两个组，反应时间都没有显示出说话者口音的显著影响。
口音的影响应该在中风后失语症个体的康复中加以考虑。临床意义包括在评估中可能低估个体的语言能力，以及可能出现的理解错误。
