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Open Access Thesis

Keywords

Aphasia--Psychological aspects; Attention--Testing;

Abstract

This experiment assessed auditory comprehension in the presence of a divided attention task. Words and nonwords were embedded within the commands of the first subtest of the Revised Token Test (RTT) to comprise the divided attention RTT (dRTT). A statistically significant poor performance was found on the dRTT compared to the RTT. Further, the subjects' performance was found not to change from the beginning to the end of the dRTT suggesting that learning and fatigue were not meaningful variables in their performance. The position of the distractor (e.g., opposite the verb, color adjective, noun, or randomly placed) had mixed affect across subjects and requires further study. One subject seemed to apply a strategy of not responding to the distractor and actually increased his dRTT score compared to the RTT score. The data suggested that the aphasic subjects could complete a divided attention task and that careful analysis of individual performance may lead to greater understanding of the role of attention in aphasic subjects' listening abilities.

Year of Submission

1999

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Department of Communicative Disorders

First Advisor

Carlin Hageman

Second Advisor

Joseph Smaldino

Third Advisor

Donald Schmits

Comments

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Date Original

1999

Object Description

1 PDF file (66 leaves)

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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