Rebecca Goodridge of HESP UMD will be defending her Honor's Thesis. All are welcome!

Title: Investigation of the relationship between language and short-term memory in persons with aphasia and neurologically healthy adults

Abstract: It is proposed that while language is the primary impairment in aphasia, there may be other cognitive deficits, including short-term memory (STM) deficits. There are unresolved issues about the relationship between STM and language in aphasia, such as the effect of testing modalities on performance and role of STM in various language systems. This project addressed these unresolved questions by investigating the relationship between STM and language tasks in persons with aphasia (PWA). A retrospective analysis of PWA performance on language tasks and verbal and nonverbal STM tasks was conducted. Empirical data were collected for neurologically healthy adults completing these tasks with background noise. Results show that PWA performed better on nonverbal STM tasks than verbal STM tasks, and that performance on language tasks was significantly positively correlated with performance on verbal, but not nonverbal, STM tasks. Data collection for neurologically healthy adults was discontinued due to ceiling performance on language tasks. The findings of this study suggest that STM is impaired in aphasia, but nonverbal STM to a lesser extent than verbal STM. Implications for aphasia evaluation and functional communication strategies for PWA are discussed.