The effects of varying attentional demands on the word retrieval skills of adults with aphasia, right hemisphere brain damage, or no brain damage

Adults with mild aphasia, right hemisphere brain damage (RBD), or no brain damage (NBD) provided one-word phrase completions under isolation, focused attention, and divided attention conditions and in response to relatively constrained or unconstrained phrase stems. Despite comparable word retrieval accuracy among groups during the isolation condition, aphasic and RED groups performed less accurately than the NBD group during focused and divided attention conditions. Across conditions, there were no significant differences between aphasic and RED groups. Only aphasic subjects demonstrated a significant effect of phrase type, responding more accurately when completings constrained versus unconstrained stimuli. For aphasic and RED groups, error type analysis indicated that semantic and phonological aspects of word retrieval were influenced by increased attentional demands. These findings suggest that for adults with aphasia or RED, there is a negative relation between attention impairments and word retrieval abilities. (C) 2000 Academic Press.