Heather Harris Wright

• PhD
• Professor at East Carolina University

Younger adults accommodate older adults by using higher pitch, a louder voice, and a slower speech rate, as well as simpler vocabulary and sentences. This scoping review synthesizes research on intergenerational accommodation over the last 60 years to explore how existing studies can inspire new research using novel experimental methods. By examini...

Aims: The purpose of this study was to: 1) examine older adults' ability to deliver coherent discourse in expository discourse elicitation tasks; and 2) explore whether cognitive ability and social behavior activity predict coherent discourse production in healthy older adults, separately by gender. Methods: Study participants included 58 neurologi...

Background Core lexicon (CL) analysis is a time efficient and possibly reliable measure that captures discourse production abilities. For people with aphasia, CL scores have demonstrated correlations with aphasia severity, as well as other discourse and linguistic measures. It was also found to be clinician‐friendly and clinically sensitive enough...

Objective Cognitive changes following adjuvant treatment for breast cancer (BC) are well documented particularly following chemotherapy. However, limited studies have examined cognitive and/or language functions in chemotherapy-naive women with BC taking tamoxifen (TAM). While there is some compelling evidence TAM affects cognitive and language dom...

Cognitive changes following adjuvant treatment for breast cancer (BC) are well documented following chemotherapy. However, limited studies have examined cognitive and/or language functions in chemotherapy-naive women with BC taking tamoxifen (TAM). Using ambulatory cognitive assessment, we investigated the trajectory of cognitive and language chang...

Background: People with language problems following stroke (aphasia) benefit from speech and language therapy. Optimising speech and language therapy for aphasia recovery is a research priority. Objectives: The objectives were to explore patterns and predictors of language and communication recovery, optimum speech and language therapy intervention...

Purpose Core lexicon measures have received growing attention in research. They are intended to provide clinicians with a clinician-friendly means to quantify word retrieval ability in discourse based on normal expectations of discourse production for specific discourse elicitation tasks. To date, different criteria have been used to develop core l...

Background Light verbs are highly frequent and semantically impoverished words. It is currently not known whether light verb production in discourse tasks differs by age or for people with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT). Aims The purpose of the current study was two‐fold: (1) to determine whether there is a relationship between age and the...

Background: Collation of aphasia research data across settings, countries and study designs using big data principles will support analyses across different language modalities, levels of impairment, and therapy interventions in this heterogeneous population. Big data approaches in aphasia research may support vital analyses, which are unachievable...

Background and Purpose Optimizing speech and language therapy (SLT) regimens for maximal aphasia recovery is a clinical research priority. We examined associations between SLT intensity (hours/week), dosage (total hours), frequency (days/week), duration (weeks), delivery (face to face, computer supported, individual tailoring, and home practice), c...

Objective Breast cancer treatments bring adverse consequences that interfere with everyday functioning. Importantly, some of these treatments are associated with cognitive and language changes. Tamoxifen is a selective estrogen receptor modulator and is a common endocrine therapy treatment for breast cancer. The current review examines the specific...

Background and Purpose The factors associated with recovery of language domains after stroke remain uncertain. We described recovery of overall-language-ability, auditory comprehension, naming, and functional-communication across participants’ age, sex, and aphasia chronicity in a large, multilingual, international aphasia dataset. Methods Individ...

Aim The aim of this scoping review is to identify the eye tracking paradigms and eye movement measures used to investigate auditory and reading comprehension deficits in persons with aphasia (PWA). Method MEDLINE via PubMed, Cochrane, CINAHL, Embase, PsycINFO, OTseeker, Scopus, Google Scholar, Grey Literature Database, and ProQuest Search (Dissert...

Introduction Few studies have reported information related to the cost-effectiveness of traditional face-to-face treatments for aphasia. The emergence and demand for telepractice approaches to aphasia treatment has resulted in an urgent need to understand the costs and cost-benefits of this approach. Methods Eighteen stroke survivors with aphasia...

Background Although discourse‐level assessments contribute to predicting real‐world performance in persons with aphasia (PWA), the use of discourse measures is uncommon in clinical settings due to resource‐heavy procedures. Moreover, assessing function word use in discourse requires the arduous procedure of defining grammatical categories for each...

Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN), a task in which participants must name a series of items as rapidly as possible, has been very useful as a measure of cognitive abilities that predict reading skill both in children and in young adults (YAs). This study examined RAN performance of 100 YAs and 80 cognitively healthy older adults (OAs). RAN performance...

Purpose: Speech and language pathology (SLP) for aphasia is a complex intervention delivered to a heterogeneous population within diverse settings. Simplistic descriptions of participants and interventions in research hinder replication, interpretation of results, guideline and research developments through secondary data analyses. This study aimed...

Purpose Comprehensive assessment of stuttering requires consideration of a wide range of behaviors that impact outcomes, and the Overall Assessment of the Speaker’s Experience of Stuttering (OASES) is an assessment tool that accomplishes such. The purpose of this study was to determine how the individual components of the test contribute to the OAS...

Persons with traumatic brain injury (TBI) often present with discourse-level deficits that affect functional communication. These deficits are not thought to be primarily linguistic in nature but instead are thought to arise from the interaction of linguistic and cognitive processes. Discourse processing treatment (DPT) is a discourse-based treatme...

Purpose: Speech and language pathology (SLP) for aphasia is a complex intervention delivered to a heterogeneous population within diverse settings. Simplistic descriptions of participants and interventions in research hinder replication, interpretation of results, guideline and research developments through secondary data analyses. This study aimed...

Background: Speech and language therapy (SLT) benefits people with aphasia following stroke. Group level summary statistics from randomised controlled trials hinder exploration of highly complex SLT interventions and a clinically relevant heterogeneous population. Creating a database of individual participant data (IPD) for people with aphasia aim...

Evidence suggests that discourse-level assessment in aphasia should be implemented within clinical settings. However, existing discourse measures that are time and labor intensive in process prevent speech-language pathologists from applying such measures to their clinical practices. This article provides an overview of a lexicon-based analysis (co...

Core Lexicon (CoreLex) is a relatively new approach assessing lexical use in discourse. CoreLex examines the specific lexical items used to tell a story, or how typical lexical items are compared with a normative sample. This method has great potential for clinical utilization because CoreLex measures are fast, easy to administer, and correlate wit...

Purpose General agreement exists in the literature that clinicians struggle with quantifying discourse-level performance in clinical settings. Core lexicon analysis has gained recent attention as an alternative tool that may address difficulties that clinicians face. Although previous studies have demonstrated that core lexicon measures are an effi...

Background: Speech and language therapy (SLT) benefits people with aphasia following stroke. Group level summary statistics from randomised controlled trials hinder exploration of highly complex SLT interventions and a clinically relevant heterogeneous population. Creating a database of individual participant data (IPD) for people with aphasia aims...

Background Stroke is one of the leading causes of death in the United States. Aphasia is a language impairment which results as a consequence of stroke. Gender differences are reported in underlying mechanisms of stroke, however, gender differences in aphasia type and severity remain unclear. Aims To examine gender differences in aphasia impairmen...

Background Discourse analysis procedures are time consuming and impractical in a clinical setting. Critical to clinicians are simple and informative discourse measures that require minimal time and labour to complete. Many studies, however, have overlooked difficulties that clinicians face. We recently developed core lexicon lists for nouns, verbs,...

Background: Speech and language therapy (SLT) interventions for people with aphasia are complex-for example, interventions vary by delivery model (face-to-face, tele-rehabilitation), dynamic (group, 1-to-1) and provider. Therapists tailor the functional relevance and intervention difficulty to the individual's needs. Therapy regimes are planned at...

Background: Individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) present with numerous discourse deficits associated with impairments to the linguistic system and other cognitive systems. Individuals with TBI may produce discourse that is lacking important information and poorly organized, as well as containing numerous coherence disrupting elements. Yet...

Background: People with aphasia (PWA) and their families identify as their priority the ability to use language at the discourse level in order to meet their daily communicative needs. However, measuring connected speech can be a challenging task due to the complex and multidimensional nature of discourse. As a result, professionals often depend on...

Compared to neurologically healthy adults, persons with aphasia (PWA) demonstrate impaired performance on working memory (WM) tasks. These deficits in WM are thought to underlie language processing problems in PWA. However, most studies use WM tasks that are verbal in nature, making it difficult to determine if these deficits are due to domain-gene...

Buy Article Permissions and Reprints Abstract Evidence suggests that persons with aphasia (PWAs) present with working memory impairments that affect a variety of language tasks. Most of these studies have focused on the phonological loop component of working memory and little attention has been paid to the episodic buffer component. The episodic b...

Buy Article Permissions and Reprints As the new Editors-in-Chief of Seminars in Speech and Language, we are honored to have the opportunity to develop issues of importance and relevance for our colleagues in speech-language pathology. As a team, we are committed to finding topics and leading-edge scholars from around the country and beyond, to offe...

Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate the ability of persons with aphasia (PWA) to resolve different types of ambiguous words (homophones, metaphors, and metonyms) in discourse contexts. Method Six PWA and 10 controls listened to short discourses that biased either the dominant (more frequent) or subordinate (less frequent) version...

Age-related changes in cognitive and language functions have been extensively researched over the past half-century. The older adult represents a unique population for studying cognition and language because of the many challenges that are presented with investigating this population, including individual differences in education, life experiences,...

Age-related changes in cognitive and language functions have been extensively researched over the past half-century. The older adult represents a unique population for studying cognition and language because of the many challenges that are presented with investigating this population, including individual differences in education, life experiences,...

Semantic memory is relatively stable across the lifespan (Rönnlund, Nyberg, & Bäckman, 200534. Rönnlund, M., Nyberg, L., & Bäckman, L. (2005). Stability, growth, and decline in adult life span development of declarative memory: Cross-sectional and longitudinal data from a population-based study. Psychology and Aging, 20(1), 3–18. 10.1037/0882-7974....

Background: Global coherence is a metric of expressive language performance that represents the speaker's ability to initiate, plan and maintain a topic of discussion. Studies indicate that disruptions of global coherence can occur during the ageing process and following neurological disease or injury. However, little is known about the specific i...

The purpose of the current study was to determine the microlinguistic processes that contribute to picture description in healthy adults across the life span. Two-hundred forty healthy adults were separated into three groups, young (n = 80; 20-39), middle (n = 80; 40-69), and older (n = 80; 70-89). Participants provided language samples in response...

Background: Researchers have demonstrated that people with aphasia (PWA) have preserved semantic knowledge (Dell et al., 1997; Jefferies & Lambon Ralph, 2006). However, Antonucci (2014) demonstrated that some PWA have impaired access to certain types of knowledge more than others. Yet, all these studies used single concepts. It has not been demons...

Background: It is well documented in the literature that the ability to produce discourse is what matters most to people with aphasia (PWA) and their families. However, quantifying discourse in typical clinical settings is a challenging task due to its dynamic and multiply determined nature. As a result, professionals often depend on confrontation...

Purpose Several novel techniques have been developed recently to assess the breadth of a speaker's vocabulary exhibited in a language sample. The specific aim of this study was to increase our understanding of the validity of the scores generated by different lexical diversity (LD) estimation techniques. Four techniques were explored: D, Maas, meas...

Purpose The objective of this study was to quantify cognitive effort that individuals with aphasia and neurologically intact participants dedicate to verbal compared with spatial working memory tasks by using a physiological measure of effort: heart rate variability (HRV). Method Participants included 8 individuals with aphasia and 19 neurological...

We describe two experiments investigating the comprehension of different types of Wh-questions in neurotypical adults (Experiment 1) and adults with Broca’s aphasia (Experiment 2). Consider as examples: Two mailmen and a fireman got into a fight yesterday afternoon. 1a. Who pushed the fireman yesterday afternoon? – Subject-extracted Who 1b. Who...

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ABSTRACT The purpose of the present research was to examine the influence of cognitive processes on discourse global coherence ability measured across different discourse tasks and collected from younger (n = 40; 20-39 years) and older (n = 40; 70-87 years) cognitively healthy adults. Study participants produced oral language samples in response to...

Discourse coherence is a reflection of the listener's ability to interpret the overall meaning conveyed by the speaker. Measuring global coherence (maintenance of thematic unity of the discourse) is useful for quantifying communication impairments at the discourse level in clinical populations and for measuring response to discourse-level treatment...

Purpose A microlinguistic content analysis for assessing lexical semantics in people with aphasia (PWA) is lexical diversity (LD). Sophisticated techniques have been developed to measure LD. However, validity evidence for these methodologies when applied to the discourse of PWA is lacking. The purpose of this study was to evaluate four measures of...

PURPOSE: The discourse of healthy older adults is commonly described as being lengthy and off-topic and is thought to be associated with a general cognitive decline that accompanies healthy aging. The purpose of this preliminary study was to investigate the overall decline in attention associated with healthy aging and its relationship to instances...

BACKGROUND: Discourse is a naturally occurring, dynamic form of communication. Coherence is one aspect of discourse and is a reflection of the listener's ability to interpret the overall meaning conveyed by the speaker. Adults with aphasia may present with impaired maintenance of global coherence, which, in turn, may contribute to their difficultie...

BACKGROUND: General agreement exists in the literature that individuals with aphasia can exhibit a working memory deficit that contributes to their language processing impairments. Though conceptualized within different working memory frameworks, researchers have suggested that individuals with aphasia have limited working memory capacity, impaired...

Background: Differences in lexical diversity (LD) across different discourse elicitation tasks have been found in neurologically intact adults (NIA) (Fergadiotis, Wright, & Capilouto, 2010) but have not been investigated systematically in people with aphasia (PWA). Measuring lexical diversity in PWA may serve as a useful clinical tool for evaluatin...

Purpose The purpose of the study was to examine the relationships among measures of comprehension and production for stories depicted in wordless pictures books and measures of memory and attention for 2 age groups. Method Sixty cognitively healthy adults participated. They consisted of two groups—young adults (20–29 years of age) and older adults...

AIMS: The goals of the study were (a) to examine the effect of discourse type on lexical diversity by testing whether there are significant differences among language samples elicited using four discourse tasks (procedures, eventcasts, story telling, and recounts); and (b) to assess the extent to which age influences lexical diversity when differen...

Background: Researchers have found that many individuals with aphasia (IWA) present with cognitive deficits that may impact their communication, and perhaps underlie their language-processing deficits (e.g., Erickson et al., 1996; Murray et al., 1997; Wright et al., 2003). However, many investigations of cognitive ability in aphasia have included m...

Background: Outcomes that support improved health-related quality of life (HRQL) are increasingly identified as desirable products to aphasia intervention. Although domain importance has been examined for survivors of stroke, little research evidence exists indicating what particular HRQL domains are or are not important to persons with aphasia (Pw...

Background: AphasiaBank is a collaborative project whose goal is to develop an archival database of the discourse of individuals with aphasia. Along with databases on first language acquisition, classroom discourse, second language acquisition, and other topics, it forms a component of the general TalkBank database. It uses tools from the wider sy...

Background: A frequent method for eliciting narratives involves presenting picture stimuli and instructing the participant to “tell me what is happening in the picture(s) or tell me everything you see going on in the picture(s)”. It has been suggested that such instructions do not make an explicit request for providing temporal–causal information a...

Background: Individuals with aphasia (IWA) present with language impairments at the discourse level. Recently researchers have found a relationship between discourse measures in aphasia and raters' perceptions of the quality of language produced by IWA. However, the relationship between naïve raters' perceptions of language quality and linguistic m...

The present study was undertaken as a preliminary investigation of the effectiveness of scripting information components for improving narrative production in adults with aphasia. It has been documented that disruptions in the linguistic abilities of adults with aphasia negatively affect their ability to convey accurate and complete narratives. Thr...

Background: For some individuals with aphasia, writing has been used as an alternative modality for communicating (e.g., Clausen & Beeson, 2003; Lustig & Tompkins, 2002). In some investigations where writing ability was treated; post-treatment and/or anecdotal reports indicated that verbal naming ability also improved for participants with aphasia...

Purpose Semantic feature analysis (SFA) was used to determine whether training contextually related words would improve the discourse of individuals with nonfluent aphasia in preselected contexts. Method A modified multiple-probes-across-behaviors design was used to train target words using SFA in 3 adults with nonfluent aphasia. Pretreatment, pos...

Background: Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is defined as primary neurodegeneration of the anterior temporal and/or frontal lobes resulting in a group of associated conditions marked by changes in cognition, language, personality, and social functioning. FTD was previously thought to be a rare disease. However, researchers report that FTD is the thir...

Purpose The Kentucky Aphasia Test (KAT) is an objective measure of language functioning for persons with aphasia. This article describes materials, administration, and scoring of the KAT; presents the rationale for development of test items; reports information from a pilot study; and discusses the role of the KAT in aphasia assessment. Method The...

BACKGROUND: Recent investigations have suggested that adults with aphasia present with a working memory deficit that may contribute to their language-processing difficulties. Working memory capacity has been conceptualised as a single "resource" pool for attentional, linguistic, and other executive processing-alternatively, it has been suggested th...

Background: Quantitative measures of discourse skills of adults with aphasia can be valuable in documenting evidenced‐based practice. Comprehensive assessment of narrative discourse should include a measure of the ability to relay main events (Nicholas & Brookshire, 1995; Wright, Capilouto, Wagovich, Cranfill, & Davis, 2005). Wright et al. (2005) c...

Unlabelled: Correct information unit (CIU) and main event analyses are quantitative measures for analyzing discourse of individuals with aphasia. Comparative data from healthy younger (YG) and older (OD) adults and an investigation of the influence of stimuli type would considerably extend the usefulness of such analyses. The objectives were (a) t...

Background: Assessing narrative discourse production in persons with aphasia has long challenged clinicians seeking to improve functional outcomes. Fortunately, the development of single picture or picture sequence stimuli has enabled clinicians to quantify aspects of elicited narrative discourse production in a clinical context. However, also need...

Recently, researchers have suggested that deficits in working memory capacity contribute to language-processing difficulties observed in individuals with aphasia (e.g., I. Caspari, S. Parkinson, L. LaPointe, & R. Katz, 1998; R. A. Downey et al., 2004; N. Friedmann & A. Gvion, 2003; H. H. Wright, M. Newhoff, R. Downey, & S. Austermann, 2003). A theo...

Processing abilities in aphasia, and the nature of processing breakdowns, were the focuses of this investigation. Individuals with either fluent or nonfluent aphasia, plus a control group, participated in a cross-modal lexical priming task designed to elicit priming effects when activation of inference interpretations occurred. Comprehension of inf...

Background : Researchers have shown that adults with aphasia often demonstrate better comprehension for discourse than for single sentences. Investigations have included presenting preceding linguistic context to facilitate comprehension of target sentences in adults with aphasia. Priming paradigms have also been used to investigate sentence and di...

Background: Important to the assessment of aphasia are analyses of discourse production and, in particular, lexical diversity analyses of verbal production of adults with aphasia. Previous researchers have used type-token ratio (TTR) to measure conversational vocabulary in adults with aphasia; however, this measure is known to be sensitive to sampl...

In comparison to younger adults, older adults demonstrate deficiencies in cognitive and linguistic abilities. Such cognitive factors that decline with age include working memory capacity and inhibitory abilities. The purpose of the present investigation was to measure differences in time course processing of inference revision abilities, as well as...

The purpose of the present investigation was to examine story retelling and inference abilities in children with language-learning disabilities (LLD). There were 10 children in the LLD group and 20 who showed normal acquisition of language, 10 of whom were matched for chronological age (NACA) and 10 of whom were matched for language ability (NALA)...

Processing and resource allocation models have been used in cognitive psychology and aphasiology in an attempt to investigate and explain the possible relationships among working memory and normal/disordered language-processing abilities. The interest of the present study was to determine potential benefits of employing revised inferences as the li...