How does stroke influence speech comprehension?

As reported in their JNeurosci paper, the researchers recorded brain activity while volunteers listened to a story. People with verbal speech processing issues from stroke were not slower to process speech sounds but had much weaker processing than healthy participants. According to the researchers, this suggests that people with this language disorder can hear sounds of all kinds as well as healthy people but have issues integrating speech sounds to understand language.

Additionally, when there was uncertainty about what words were being said, healthy people processed speech sound features longer compared to those who had experienced a stroke. This could mean that, following stroke, people do not process speech sounds long enough to successfully comprehend words that are difficult to detect.

This work points to brain activity patterns that may be crucial for understanding verbal language, according to the authors. First author Jill Kries expresses excitement about continuing to explore how this simple approach-listening to a story-can be used to improve diagnostics for conditions characterized by language processing issues, which currently involve hours of behavioral tasks. 

Reference:

Jill Kries, Maaike Vandermosten and Laura Gwilliams, The spatio-temporal dynamics of phoneme encoding in aging and aphasia, JNeurosci, https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1001-25.2025