The Relationship between Strum Rhythm and Speech Pauses in a Trial Study of Music Enriched Verb Network Strengthening Treatment

Abstract

Aphasia is a language disorder that may be caused by stroke or traumatic brain injury. Individuals with aphasia (IWAs) may experience difficulties with word finding, reading, auditory comprehension, writing, and/or other speech and language related challenges. Many IWAs receive speech-language therapy to address these issues. One speech-language intervention for this population is Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST), which focuses on action verbs and related subject-direct object (agent-patient) pairs. Music therapy (MT) has also been used to treat aphasia, exploiting elements common to speech and music such as pitch, rhythm, and prosody to address non-musical clinical goals related to verbal expression. MeVNeST (Music Enriched Verb Network Strengthening Treatment) is an experimental music therapy treatment currently being investigated by doctoral candidate Jing-Wen Zhang. MeVNeST follows the same steps as traditional VNEST but replaces spoken prompts and responses with improvised singing in the context of live, improvised guitar accompaniment. The purpose of both VNEST and MeVNEST is to improve clients’ ability to retrieve common action verbs along with related nouns. The present study focuses on the relationship between accented beats in the guitar accompaniment of MeVNeST sessions and the duration of pauses before and within client responses to clinician prompts. The goal is to determine whether certain strum patterns are associated with more efficient word retrieval. Two strum conditions were identified: a normative beat (unsyncopated) and a syncopated beat. Fourteen audio samples from Zhang’s study were considered: seven from each strum condition, drawn from two study participants. Music and speech data from two of these samples were then coded in Praat and analyzed in Excel. Results showed no statistically significant difference between strum conditions for pauses before responses. There was a statistically significant pause duration within responses, with shorter responses being associated with the syncopated strum condition. Future studies should continue to examine how rhythmic musical accompaniment might be used to support and enhance purposeful, fluent speech and to minimize verbal hesitations.