Music listening, attention, and aphasia (Sebranek & LaCroix, 2025)

<p dir="ltr"><b>Purpose: </b>People with aphasia (PWA) with cognitive deficits have poorer treatment outcomes than those without. However, aphasia therapy rarely focuses on cognition, which may partly explain the variability often observed in treatment outcomes. Listening to music has been shown to positively impact cognition in neurotypical adults. The purpose of this study was to extend this prior research by investigating whether listening to music induces short-term improvements in attention in PWA.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Method:</b> Forty-three PWA were assigned to listen to music characterized as happy (major mode, fast tempo) or sad (minor mode, slow tempo) or no music for 10 min. Attention was measured before and after music listening using the Attention Network Test, which measures three types of attention: alerting, orienting, and executive control. Mixed analyses of variance were used to explore how each type of attention changed after music listening by group and aphasia severity.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Results:</b> Our results demonstrate that listening to happy music temporarily enhanced orienting attention, regardless of aphasia severity. Happy music listening also induced short-term improvements in alerting attention for individuals with moderate–severe aphasia. Executive control attention was not modulated by music listening.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Conclusions: </b>Our findings indicate that music listening may induce short-term improvements in attention in PWA. However, further research is needed to clarify the extent of these effects and the underlying mechanisms driving music-induced changes in attention.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Supplemental Material S1. </b>Mixed ANOVAs that only include PWA characterized as having aphasia according to the WAB-R AQ score (i.e., AQ score < 93.8).</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Supplemental Material S2.</b> Individual participant attention scores before (T1) and after (T2) music listening.</p><p dir="ltr">Sebranek, E., & LaCroix, A. N. (2025). Music listening induces short-term changes in attention in poststroke aphasia. <i>American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology,</i><i> </i><i>34</i>(5), 2907–2918. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_AJSLP-24-00461" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_AJSLP-24-00461</a></p>