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The thorny issue of choosing outcome measures for aphasia therapy trials: A comparison of discourse and aphasia battery outcomes following Multi-modality and Constraint Induced aphasia therapy
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Integrating aphasia into stroke best practices: A Canadian KTE strategy
Full text linkThis poster reports on the activities to date of the Stroke and Aphasia Canada team including results of a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Knowledge Translation (KT) planning grant (grant #290592, 2013)
Localizing unique and overlapping lesion locations in apraxia of speech and aphasia
No full textSince Darley’s original description of apraxia of speech (AOS; 1968), controversy has centered around its diagnosis, treatment, and lesion location. Behaviors common to AOS are often shared among other communication disorders, complicating clinical management. The current study sought to identify crucial brain damage that causes apraxic speech, as well as errors common in both AOS and aphasia. Results revealed that damage to premotor and supplementary motor areas is unique to AOS, while involvement of temporal lobe areas predicts behaviors attributable to aphasia. These findings contribute to research regarding the neuroanatomical mechanism of AOS, and may ultimately improve differential diagnostic procedures
Frequency and co-occurrence of suppression and coarse coding deficits in adults with RHD
Full text linkThis study examines two language processing functions that have the potential to create socially handicapping language comprehension difficulties in adults with right hemisphere brain damage (RHD). The first, coarse semantic coding, allows normal comprehenders to bring to mind distant meanings or features of words that are appropriate in highly specific contexts (e.g., the "rotten" feature of the word "apple" in the context of spoiled produce). The second, suppression, is a process that inhibits contextually-irrelevant meanings (e.g., the "card-playing" meaning of the word "spade" in "He dug with the spade."). In prior work, some adults with RHD were found to have impaired suppression1-4 or coarse coding processes5-6. These language processing impairments can make it difficult for individuals with RHD to participate in everyday social communication. For example, they can have trouble thinking beyond the most typical instance of an entity (e.g., an apple that's red, round, and crunchy) when another instance is being referred to (e.g., an apple that's rotten). Another possibility is they can be misled by ambiguities which are commonplace in conversation, and have difficulty getting back on track (e.g., keeping in mind the "card-playing" meaning of the word "spade" in a sentence like "He dug with the spade"). These problems predict comprehension performance on measures of narrative comprehension, as well7,8.
To date, there is no information about how prevalent these deficits are, or how often they may co-occur in the same individual. This project identifies the proportions of a sizeable group of adults with RHD that have either a coarse coding deficit, a suppression deficit, co-occurring deficits, or neither deficit in reference to criteria developed from prior studies of healthy control subjects1-3,5,6
Statistical Learning in Aphasia: Preliminary Results from an Artificial Grammar Learning Task
No full textStatistical learning, i.e., the discovery of structure based on statistical properties of stimuli, is considered an implicit process that plays an important role in nonlinguistic and linguistic tasks, including speech segmentation and grammar learning (Aslin & Newport, 2012; Saffran, 2002; Saffran et al., 1996). Moreover, individual differences in statistical learning ability have been shown to be associated with natural language processing (Misyak & Christiansen, 2012; Misyak et al., 2010). Yet little is known about this type of learning in individuals with aphasia, who must relearn linguistic skills after brain damage. To date, studies of implicit learning processes in aphasia have provided mixed results, including evidence of limited or absent implicit learning for a visual artificial grammar (Christiansen et al., 2010; Zimmerer et al., 2014), as well as evidence of relatively intact implicit learning in Serial Reaction Time tasks (Goschke et al., 2001; Schuchard & Thompson, 2013). The purpose of the present study was to test statistical learning and overnight consolidation of an artificial phrase structure grammar under implicit conditions in individuals with agrammatic aphasia and healthy age-matched adults
Referential Ambiguity in the Narrative Productions of African American Adults Proposal for CAC 2014
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Crosslinguistic Generalization of Semantic Treatment in Aphasia: Evidence from the Indian Context
No full textThe last two decades witnessed several novel treatment approaches to aphasia therapy. Semantic feature-based therapy is one of such treatment approaches that gained considerable research attention (Boyle & Coelho, 1995). More importantly, this treatment approach has been found effective in bilingual persons with aphasia. For instance, Edmonds and Kiran (2006) administered semantic feature based therapy in Spanish-English bilingual persons with aphasia and reported of crosslinguistic generalization of treatment effect to untreated language. This promising research, however, needs to be replicated and extended to novel language pairs.
Research on crosslinguistic generalization of treatment effects is of paramount importance to multilingual countries like India. For instance, with several hundreds of languages and dialects spoken across India and with the pervasive use of English as second language, speech language pathologists (SLPs) in the country are often baffled on the selection of language for treatment in bilingual persons with aphasia. Empirical evidence from Indian languages would add confidence to the SLPs while selecting language for treatment in person with aphasia. In this context, the current study aimed to replicate and extend the earlier findings on crosslinguistic generalization of treatment effects in bilingual persons with aphasia to the Indian context
Localizing lesion locations to predict extent of aphasia recovery
No full textExtensive research has related specific lesion locations to language impairment in aphasia. However, far less work has focused on the patterns of brain damage that predict prognosis in aphasia. The current study examined brain damage as a predictor of language recovery in acute patients with aphasia caused by stroke. Damage to the left posterior middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and left pars triangularis predicted poor recovery of speech production and MTG damage predicted less recovery of speech comprehension. These findings suggest that brain changes associated with language recovery rely on preservation and recruitment of the aforementioned areas in the left hemisphere
Normative data for the WAB-R: A comparison of monolingual English speakers, Asian Indian-English bilinguals, and Spanish-English bilinguals
No full textThe United States population is more culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) than it has ever been (U.S. Census, 2010). The incidence of many neurological disorders, such as cerebrovascular disease, is also higher for particular ethnic and racial minorities, including Hispanics, African Americans, and Asians than for the general population (Healthy People 2020; Schiller et al., 2012). Therefore, CLD clients, many of whom are second language (L2) English speakers, constitute a large and growing proportion of the caseload in adult neurorehabilitation settings. Speech language pathologists (SLPs) working in such settings have rated aphasia as the most difficult condition to assess and treat for CLD clients (Centeno, 2009, in preparation). A primary challenge is accurate assessment of language abilities for several reasons: L2 speakers may have limited English proficiency, bilingualism affects test performance of even highly proficient bilinguals (Gollan et al., 2007), CLD groups differ widely in familiarity with test stimuli, and the normative samples of most diagnostic tests are not representative of CLD populations (Langdon & Wiig, 2009). The dearth of normative data on L2 speakers is a serious concern that could limit the validity of an aphasia diagnosis. Despite knowledge of these issues, SLPs report using standardized English language tests with L2 speakers (Caesar & Kohler, 2007). Hence there is a critical need to validate the diagnostic accuracy of standardized English tests for CLD adults to distinguish genuine language deficits from differences in language experience (Centeno, 2009; Mungas et al., 2011).
The main goal of this study is to collect and report additional normative data for the Western Aphasia Battery-Revised (WAB-R, Kertesz, 2006). The WAB-R was normed on just twenty individuals: 6 neurologically healthy and 14 with aphasia (Kertesz, 2006, pg. 106). Given that it is one of the most widely used aphasia batteries (Simmons-Mackie, Threats, & Kagan, 2005), it is crucial to expand the normative sample of the WAB-R. This study focuses on two of the most rapidly growing bilingual demographic groups in the United States (U.S. Census, 2010): Asian Indian-English (AI-E) and Spanish-English (S-E) speakers. There were three specific aims: 1) to collect and compare normative data for AI-E, S-E and monolingual English speakers, 2) to compare the three groups’ overall severity (Aphasia Quotient: AQ) and individual subtest scores, and 3) to identify particular areas of difficulty across subtests or participant groups
Neural correlates of grammatical impairment in primary progressive aphasia
Full text linkPrimary progressive aphasia (PPA) is characterized by distinct patterns of left-lateralized neural degeneration and declining language functioning. Although deficits in grammatical processing (e.g., complex sentence production and comprehension, production of grammatical morphology) are primarily seen in the agrammatic variant (PPA-G), subtle impairments also may be observed in the logopenic (PPA-L) and semantic (PPA-S) variants (see Wilson, et al., 2012; Thompson & Mack, in press, for a review). In cognitively healthy individuals, production and comprehension of syntactically complex structures involves both the left middle temporal cortex (Ben-Shalom & Poeppel, 2008; Indefrey & Levelt, 2004) and the left inferior frontal and motor cortices (Friederici, 2002; Kielar et al., 2011; Shapiro, et al., 2012; Tyler et al., 2005), with similar regions engaged for production of grammatical morphology. However, impaired complex sentence production and comprehension in PPA has been linked primarily to atrophy in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) (Amici et al., 2007; Rogalski et al., 2011; Wilson et al., 2011) and atrophy patterns associated with deficits in grammatical morphology have not been previously studied. The present study aimed to identify the cortical areas of atrophy associated with deficits in complex sentence production, complex sentence comprehension, and production of grammatical morphology in PPA. Identification of these patterns has relevance for understanding the neural mechanisms of grammatical processing and as well as for clinical management of individuals with PPA