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Will treatment facilitate learning of a problem solving strategy by persons with Alzheimer’s disease?
No full textDeficits in problem solving are a prominent feature of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The present study aimed to determine whether or not persons with AD could learn to use a strategy for solving problems. Four individuals with AD were taught to use a reduction strategy to solve twenty questions problems (20Q). Although results of this study indicate that individuals did not learn to use the stressed strategy, participants did improve their ability to solve problems using strategies already familiar to them. This suggests that treatment should focus on skills the person with AD is already using rather than teaching new strategies
Maximizing Generalization Effects of Semantic Feature Analysis
No full textNumerous treatments have been developed that have successfully facilitated naming in aphasia (see Laine & Martin, 2006 for a review). However, in most cases, positive treatment effects have been observed primarily with trained items, with limited improvements in untrained items. That is, response generalization remains a challenge in the treatment of anomia
Masked priming treatment for anomia
No full textThis Phase 1 single-subject study explored the use of masked repetition priming to improve word retrieval for picture naming in anomia. Masked priming is one means of activating the implicit language processes that typically support rapid, accurate use of language, and that may be impaired in aphasia. This study used computer-based presentation of masked primes repeatedly paired with pictures to encourage re-establishment of implicit language networks. Results from one participant show positive training effects, suggesting that masked primes may be an effective way to directly address repair or rebuilding of language networks in anomia
The Effect of Plausibility in Sentence Processing
Get PDFThe study of sentence processing in aphasia is important for the development of effective treatments for sentence processing deficits in aphasia. Recent research has shown that syntax and semantics can interact during sentence processing in a variety of ways. However, the way the interaction between syntax and semantics plays out in aphasia has not been satisfactorily explained. One unexplored area in this body of research is the effect of plausibility on syntactic priming of the dative alternation in persons with aphasia. To date, persons with aphasia have been shown to be sensitive to plausibility during sentence processing in general (Caramazza & Zurif, 1976) and the dative alternation has been shown to be primed in persons with aphasia (Hartsuiker & Kolk, 1998). Plausibility has been shown to affect syntactic priming in neurologically healthy adults, such that implausible active or passive sentences prime the opposite structure in production (Christiansen et al., 2010). Recently, the dative alternation has been shown to be particularly sensitive to semantic influences in neurologically healthy adults (Gibson & Bergen, 2011, manuscript in preparation). Therefore, exploring the effect of plausibility on priming the dative alternation in persons with aphasia is a novel and especially interesting way in which to examine the interaction of syntax and semantics that will inform aphasia treatment research
Characterizing discourse deficits following penetrating head injury
Get PDFDiscourse analyses have demonstrated utility for delineating subtle, non-aphasic communication deficits following diffuse axonal damage secondary to closed head injuries (CHI). The present investigation utilized discourse analyses for individuals with multi-focal cortical, subcortical, and white matter lesions resulting from penetrating head injuries (PHI). Story narratives were analyzed from two groups of participants, 167 survivors of PHIs and 46 non-injured individuals. Three measures distinguished the groups: narrative length, story grammar, and completeness. Results are consistent with previous findings for CHI participants, specifically that macro-structural/organizational measures best characterize discourse deficits following PHI
Does orthographic overlap influence lexical selection?
No full textUnderstanding whether and how various processes interact in language production can help us both understand aphasic errors and develop theoretically motivated treatment approaches. We examined semantic errors produced in writing-to-dictation by an individual with acquired dysgraphia to determine whether letter-level information – particularly overlap between the target and the semantic error – can affect lexical selection processes in these errors. Our results indicated that the particular semantic errors that were produced were significantly more likely to share orthographic structure than would be expected by chance alone, indicating interaction in the form of feedback from letter-level processes to lexical selection
Evaluation of an Attention Training and Metacognitive Facilitation Intervention for Reading Comprehension in Mild Aphasia
Get PDFThe characterization of aphasia as a pure linguistic deficit has constrained intervention research to singularly target language dysfunction (Connor, Albert, Helm-Estabrooks, & Obler, 2000). Recently this assumption has been called into question with the realization that traditional language models do not account for the variability of performance within and across people with aphasia, (Connor et al., 2000; Erickson, Goldinger, & LaPointe, 1996; McNeil, Odell, & Tseng, 1991; Tseng, McNeil, & Milenkovic, 1993). The limitations of purely linguistic models of aphasia have led researchers to evaluate the role of non-linguistic cognitive processes, particularly attention and working memory processes, in aphasia
Preliminary Evidence for using Heart Rate Variability as a Measure of Cognitive Effort
No full textResearchers have suggested that language deficits in individuals with aphasia may result from an inability to adequately allocate effort to verbal tasks (e.g. Clark & Robin, 1995). Heart rate variability has been used as a physiological measure of cognitive effort (e.g. Aasman et al., 1987). The purpose of this study is to establish baseline data and verify the utility of HRV as an indicator of cognitive effort on tasks used with IWA. Relationships among neurologically intact participants’ accuracy on verbal and spatial n-back tasks, the physiological measure of effort (HRV), and perceptions of task difficulty will be reported
Treating acquired alexia and cognitive impairment: Does attention training augment a text-based treatment protocol?
No full textResearchers have developed and implemented a number of treatment protocols for acquired dyslexia; the bulk of these, motivated by cognitive neuropsychological models, are directed at the single-word level (cf. Beeson & Henry, 2008) and have suffered from lack of generalization to functional reading contexts
A preliminary study to investigate the expressive syntactic ability of normal speakers
No full textGrammatical problem was one of the most prominent characteristics of speech in persons with aphasia (Gordon, 2006) and progressive aphasic syndromes (Knibb, Woollams, Hodges, & Patterson, 2009). Measures used to investigate the grammatical deficits on the discourse performance of persons with aphasia could be roughly classified into to two categories, one related to the level of lexicon, the other concerned with the level of syntax. Most of the measures belonged to the former category used words to analysis the variation on the speech performance, such as correct information units (CIUs; Nicholas & Brookshire, 1993), type token ratio (TTR); while the measures applied in studies related to the syntactic ability was more varied. Such as proportion of sentences well formed, auxiliary scores, proportion of verbs inflected, proportion of obligatory determiners in quantitative production analysis (QPA) (Gordon, 2006), and the mean length of the syntactic units, the proportion of syntactic units suggested by Lind, Kristoffersen, Moen, and Simonsen (2009). However, the measures used to depict the syntactic ability of a person was separated, could not provide a profile to reveal a pattern of syntactic ability in a consecutive picture. In order to develop a syntactic scoring system that can capture the changes in the characteristics of narrative speech, we adopted the concept from studies in child language development (Hsu, 2003) and widen the category to encompass the imperfect parts in natural speech. The applicability of this scoring system was firstly tested by the normal population in order to examine if the range of the scope is suitable for reflecting the expressive syntactic ability of a normal speaker