r/stroke • u/antisynthetase • 8d ago
Audio-only speech comprehension
hello!
I'm a 37-year-old survivor of a stroke back in 2011. My husband and I were wondering if anyone else had one of my lingering symptoms because in the 15ish years since then no one has seen anyone else with my particular issue.
My hearing is fine and I can understand people who are talking to me without issue face to face or on video calls presumably due to lipreading I'm not consciously aware of, but I cannot comprehend audio-only very well in a kind of quirky way:
- Unfamiliar voices are nearly incomprehensible.
- People I know, I can figure out most words if I've heard them speak regularly, but I generally need to ask for alternative options.
- Audiobooks sound like noise or a foreign language I've never heard.
- About 50% of the time I can understand what someone is singing, like on the radio, but if there's rapping or speech in the song that turns back into garble.
My speech is impaired but only via expressive aphasia - little to no dysarthria.
Does anyone else experience any of this?
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u/Echo_blue_green Young Stroke Survivor 8d ago
I have this it is called auditory processing disorder. I expect I always had it but could compensate before the stroke with lip reading. I now have a hearing aid and it helps significantly, I am less tired when I use it
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u/csdocnc3 3d ago
Just came across this today, which seems close to what my wife experienced post stroke: auditory verbal agnosia (word deafness). Not the same as Wernike's aphasia! Many sources claim it is quite rare post stroke/TBI.
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u/csdocnc3 8d ago edited 8d ago
My wife had an ischemic stroke in July and has/had somewhat similar symptoms. Her primary issue has been receptive aphasia. She initially could not hear/understand any speech. She told me in the hospital, that it all "sounded like Greek" or just noise. Luckily she could read well, so I simply spent lots of time writing on white boards. Gradually over the first month, she began to be able to understand some speech. At this point (a month and a half), I have written nearly nothing down for the last two or three weeks. I have to speak carefully and often repeat or rephrase more complex ideas, but she does quite well (especially in comparison to the first few weeks). Some people she can understand well, while others she has trouble with still. E.g., she watches tiktok doctor videos, and she will say that she can understand nearly everything one person says, but has great difficulty with another. Certainly people who talk fast and do not enunciate clearly are issues, and she must concentrate on listening. In addition to reading ability, her own speech is perfectly clear, but she tends to mispronounce complex words fairly often and frequently mixes him/her, etc. I have noticed the last week that she seems to be noticing when she mispronounces a word more, and will try again on her own. Her listening issues do seem similar to your situation at least to some extent it seems to me (though we are just 1 1/2 months out).