The goal of the current study was to develop a pupillometric method for assessing auditory comprehension in individuals with aphasia. There are many potential confounds when assessing such individuals because common impairments of attention, vision, and motor function may influence results of language comprehension testing. Pupillometry has been used to determine aspects of participants' responses to verbal and visual stimuli, but has not been used in comprehension assessment.
Forty control participants and 38 participants with aphasia (PWA) participated. Visual and auditory stimuli were presented simultaneously as pupils were monitored. A sorting task was completed to validate stimulus selection. Pupillary responses were
analyzed according to a series of dependent measures. Significant differences were not found in pupillary responses between people with and without aphasia or significant trends related to severity of aphasia within PWA. Significant correlations were found between pupillary responses and certain aspects of estimated word difficulty.