Social Identity and Aphasia: How Gender Connections Influence Communicative Spaces 

Presenter

Megan Bondar

Campus

UMass Amherst

Sponsor

Jennifer Mack, Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, UMass Amherst

Schedule

Session 5, 3:30 PM - 4:15 PM [Schedule by Time][Poster Grid for Time/Location]

Location

Poster Board A67, Campus Center Auditorium, Row 4 (A61-A80) [Poster Location Map]

Abstract

Aphasia is a language disorder caused by damage to the brain, oftentimes resulting from a stroke. Aphasia self-disclosure is when a person with aphasia (PWA) explains that they have aphasia, and how it affects their ability to communicate.  

Language, in its varied forms, facilitates the strength of human connection. One’s voice, and the words they express through this communicative vehicle, can dually serve as an empowering identifier and a channel through which they connect with others. Communicative environments are social spaces that foster communicative interactions and connections through verbal exchanges of thoughts, ideas, feelings, and emotions. As listeners are constituents of communicative environments, in this study we will examine listeners’ role in affecting PWA’s conversational experiences and social identity, particularly after PWA self-advocate.  

Shared membership of a social ingroup can encourage the reciprocity of social support (Harmon, 2020). We thus hypothesize that a deeper social connection is facilitated through one dimension of PWA’s identity (gender expression) to better enhance the effectiveness of aphasia self-advocacy. An objective of the current study is to explore if belonging to the same ingroup, gender, has a beneficial, associated positive effect upon communicative interactions between listeners and speakers with aphasia who self-disclose their condition. Additionally, the current study seeks to investigate how a shared gender expression mediates connections between listeners and PWA.  

I’ll be performing new, secondary analyses on an existing dataset from a pre-existing study conducted in Dr. Mack’s NOLA lab: “Listening to Aphasia Self-Advocacy Scripts: Thoughts and Emotions Reported by Unfamiliar Communication Partners.” 

Keywords

aphasia, self-advocacy, gender

Research Area

Neuroscience and Cognitive Science

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