Introduction: Persons with aphasia (PWA) experience inordinate difficulty listening to speech in noise.  In degraded conditions, the visual modality facilitates auditory processing (Jesse & Janse, 2012).  The purpose of this project was to examine the influence of increased noise and visual information for auditory processing in PWA.

Methods: We tested 12 individuals with normal hearing, 7 with mild aphasia following left hemisphere CVA and five controls. Participants completed the Quick Speech in Noise (Killion et al., 2004), an audiologic measure requiring sentence repetition, in the standard auditory-only (AUD) condition and the experimental auditory+visual (AV) condition (face on monitor). We calculated the number of key words correct across five SNR levels for AUD and AV conditions. 

Results: The aphasia group performed significantly lower than controls across SNR levels (F=8.37, p=.01, partial h²=.46),. Both groups showed a modality advantage as AV was significantly greater than AUD (F=66.92, p=.00, partial h²=.87), except for SNR 0 where a significant between groups difference occurred (t=2.36, p=.04).

Conclusions: In the most difficult noise level (0 dB), the aphasia group experience considerably less benefit from visual information than the controls, suggesting that PWA may need compensatory strategies or intervention to engage visual information to support auditory processing in difficult conditions.