Focused Stress Clinical Trial
Official title:
Identification and Comprehension of Focused Stress in a Sentence Among Adults Who Suffered Traumatic Brain Injury
Researches that focus on the perception of prosodic elements among adult who suffered
traumatic brain injury (TBI), focus on their ability to decipher intonation in order to
understand an additional meaning of a sentence. According to these researches, adults who
suffer from TBI, with no signs of Aphasia, have difficulty perceiving and deciphering
intonation (Marquardt et al., 2001; Angeleri et al., 2008). The current research asks to
broaden the knowledge in this domain by examining the ability of adults with TBI to
understand an additional prosodic element - focused stress.
The ability to identify and understand focused stress in a sentence requires different
abilities. First, a psychoacoustic ability in order to detect the stressed word. Second, an
ability to understand the lexical grammatical meaning of the word as it negates other
possible meanings (for example, in the sentence "I'm eating a red apple" the stressed word
negated the option of a different color). Third, an understanding of the stressed word as it
creates a different pragmatic/social meaning (for example, in the sentence "mom, I asked for
red, yellow and green candy" the role of the stressed word is to mark the candy that the
addressee didn't get).
The aim of the study is to assess the ability of adults who had experienced TBI to grasp and
understand the meaning of focused stress in the different contexts that were described
above. An additional aim is to examine if differences in speech and cognitive abilities can
describe some of the variation in the results.
Thirty adults between the ages of 18-50 years will take part in this study, fifteen adults
who had experienced moderate to severe TBI (0.5-3 years post injury) and fifteen healthy
adults. Each participant with TBI will be matched to a healthy adult by gender, age,
education and social-economic status. All of the participants will be Hebrew native
speakers, with no learning disability, no neurological injury, proper speech abilities and
no hearing impairment.
The participants will undergo seven different tests in three different meetings (60 minute
each), in a quiet room at Sheba - Academic Medical Center Hospital. The tests will include
different cognitive and language examinations. The main test of the study will be The Hebrew
Focused Stress Test (HFST). The HFST includes three subtests. The first subtest requires
identification of the stressed word in a sentence based on psychoacoustic abilities alone.
The second and the third subtests require understanding the meaning of focused stress in
different contexts - lexical grammatical and pragmatic/social. The test includes forty eight
recorded sentences. In each sentence one word is stressed. The participants will be asked to
listen to the recordings and answer a closed question regarding the stressed word.
| Status | Recruiting |
| Enrollment | 30 |
| Est. completion date | September 2016 |
| Est. primary completion date | May 2016 |
| Accepts healthy volunteers | Accepts Healthy Volunteers |
| Gender | Both |
| Age group | 18 Years to 50 Years |
| Eligibility |
Inclusion Criteria: - Severity between moderate - severe as measured by the Glascow Coma Scale and time of PTA. - Hebrew native speakers. - between the ages of 18-50 years old. - with no history of head trauma. - with no history of use of addictive substance. - with no history of psychiatric disorder. - with no history of language disorder or language learning disability. - with no degenerative cognition. - are not suffering from aphasia. - with a vision good enough to perform the tests of the study. - with no hearing impairment. - with a reading ability that is good enough to perform the test of the study. |
Allocation: Randomized, Intervention Model: Single Group Assignment, Masking: Open Label, Primary Purpose: Diagnostic
| Country | Name | City | State |
|---|---|---|---|
| Israel | Sheba Medical Center | Ramat Gan |
| Lead Sponsor | Collaborator |
|---|---|
| Sheba Medical Center |
Israel,
| Type | Measure | Description | Time frame | Safety issue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Primary | The Hebrew Focused Stress Test (HFST) | The HFST includes three subtests. The first subtest requires identification of the stressed word in a sentence based on psychoacoustic abilities alone. The second and the third subtests require understanding the meaning of focused stress in different contexts - lexical grammatical and pragmatic/social. The test includes forty eight recorded sentences. In each sentence one word is stressed. The participants will be asked to listen to the recordings and answer a closed question regarding the stressed word. | 15 min | No |