Inner speech in post-stroke motor aphasia

AbstractThe goal of the present study was to determine whether chronic post-stroke patients with motor aphasia have impaired inner speech abilities and whether they use inner speech in everyday life. To answer these questions, we recruited eight chronic post-stroke aphasic patients and 13 cognitively healthy adults who underwent testing on a range of evaluative tests and four experiments specifically designed for the purposes of this study. The experimental results suggest that post-stroke patients with motor aphasia have impaired inner speech. However, patients’ subjective reports indicate that they use various types of inner speech, despite theobserved deficit. Taken together, our data suggest that impairment of certain aspects of inner speech may still allow a degree of use of other aspects of inner speech, emphasizing a need to extend research on inner speech in aphasia to the variety of its forms.