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Electrophysiological responses to argument structure violations in healthy adults and individuals with nonfluent aphasia
No full textAgrammatic individuals show impaired production of verbs with complex argument structure. Whether these participants show argument structure deficits during comprehension, however, is unclear. The present study investigated this issue by examining electrophysiological responses to argument structure violations in agrammatic individuals and healthy adults. Results showed that unlike control participants, who evinced a negative effect followed by a positive shift (N400-P600) in response to argument structure violations, individuals with agrammatic aphasia showed a P600 response only. This suggests impaired real time processing of the thematic requirements of verbs
Phonological Facilitation of Object Naming in Agrammatic and Logopenic Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA): Evidence for a Phonological Processing Deficit
No full textNaming is a pervasive deficit in primary progressive aphasia. However, the source of such deficits across PPA variants is little understood. In this study, individuals with agrammatic (PPA-G) and logopenic (PPA-L) PPA, along with age-matched controls, performed a picture-word interference task to test for online phonological processing deficits during naming. All groups exhibited phonological facilitation (PF) effects, i.e., speeded picture naming in the presence of phonologically-related words. However, the PPA participants exhibited abnormally large PF effects that also were protracted, compared to the control group. These results suggest that impaired phonological processing may contribute to anomia in PPA-G and PPA-L
Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation and Intensive Language Therapy: Comparing Anodal and Cathodal Stimulation in Two Participants with Aphasia
Get PDFMethods that modulate cortical excitability have potential as adjuvant treatments for aphasia rehabilitation. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a non-invasive method of stimulation with clinical advantages over other methods, in that it is portable, relatively simple and inexpensive to administer, with minimal side effects to participants. Furthermore, tDCS can be administered easily simultaneously with behavioral speech-language therapy (SLT)
The Hospital Communication Disability Screener: Detecting patients with communication activity limitation in the acute hospital setting
No full textMany people with language and /or cognitive impairments experience difficulty communicating their healthcare needs when they are patients in hospital. That is, they have a communication activity limitation. The Inpatient Functional Communication Interview (IFCI) is a tool to assess communication activity limitation in the hospital setting, however it takes too long to administer to all inpatients. A screening tool is needed. The IFCI assessments of 71 patients were analysed to develop a screening tool, called the Hospital Communication Disability Screener to detect patients with a communication activity limitation in the hospital setting
A division into three subtypes of apraxia of speech: ideomotor, kinetic and ideational
No full textIn this paper we propose a division into three subtypes of AOS. We believe that this division provides a significant step forward towards a more specific and clinically useful diagnosis of AOS. We also believe the major impact on the therapy for AOS. The ideomotor AOS patients for example, need to regain access to the GMPs whereas kinetic AOS patients have to relearn the exact execution movement.Currently we are working on a therapeutic instrument for AOS, amongst other things based on this new insight. We hope to present the development process of this instrument in the near future
A novel approach to training verbs in two individuals with chronic aphasia
No full textA novel intervention for the rehabilitation of verb naming disorders was applied to two individuals with chronic aphasia. This intervention examined the effectiveness of intensive implicit semantic training for improving verb production. This was done without the requirement of an overt response. Implicit interventions, such as these, practiced without overt speech, can improve verbal output, hypothetically through activation of the interrelated semantic, lexical and phonological networks known to underlie word production. For the individuals with aphasia and apraxia of speech, implicit therapy has the advantage of reducing production error and the associated effects of reinforcing the neural circuits that are activated while producing errors. Prior work has shown that error-reducing training can improve naming and discourse and these results were accompanied by increased activation of the left inferior frontal cortex during verb generation tasks as measured by fMRI (Davis, Harrington & Baynes, 2006). The use of a similar approach, implicit phoneme manipulation to treat apraxia of speech, also improved speech production at the word level (Davis, Farias, & Baynes, 2008)
Using a Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA) to Improve Working Memory and Conversational Discourse in Fluent Aphasia
Get PDFThe concept of working memory involves a short duration system in which small amounts of information are simultaneously stored and manipulated in the service of accomplishing a task (Caplan & Waters, 1999). Individuals with aphasia have working memory impairments to the extent they suffer from executive functioning limitations and deficits specific to language areas including syntax, phonology, and semantics (Laures, Odell, & Coe,2003; Wright & Shisler, 2005). In particular, deficits in working memory could contribute to a breakdown in word retrieval which can restrict the participation of an individual with aphasia in the most meaningful communication activities, particularly conversation (Goodglass & Wingfield, 1997). There is evidence that a Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA) improved word retrieval and even conversation in individuals with aphasia by providing semantic cueing for access to the semantic and phonological networks (Massaro & Tompkins, 1992; Rider, Wright, Marshall, & Page, 2008; Peach & Reuter, 2009)
Generalization of a Novel, Implicit Treatment for Coarse Coding Deficit
Get PDFThe language comprehension deficits in adults with focal right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) can cause considerable social handicap. To date, however, treatment for language deficits in this population remains almost entirely untested.
This abstract reports a single-subject experimental design study, performed to investigate whether Contextual Constraint Treatment -- a novel, implicit, stimulation-facilitation treatment for language comprehension processes -- can yield generalized gains to broader measures of language comprehension in adults with RHD.
The focus of Contextual Constraint Treatment (CCT) is motivated by two major accounts of common language comprehension problems in adults with RHD: coarse coding and suppression deficits. The patient in this study had a coarse coding (CC) deficit, so we describe here only the CC version of the treatment. CC processes activate wide-ranging aspects of word meaning independent of the surrounding context, and CC deficits in adults with RHD impair the processing of distant meanings or features of words (e.g., “rotten” as a feature of “apple”)1. CC is a partially domain-general language comprehension process. That is, CC ability predicts aspects of discourse comprehension, is hypothesized to underpin figurative language comprehension, and is involved in processing phrasal metaphors2. Thus, treatment that improves CC processes has the potential to generalize to a range of communicative outcomes.
CCT is novel in aiming to facilitate comprehension processes implicitly, through contextual prestimulation. This approach contrasts with the majority of treatments for neurologically-based cognitive-linguistic disorders, which are direct, explicit, and/or metalinguistic. We implemented this approach to avoid confounding treatment of impaired processes with irrelevant, and potentially difficult, task demands, as adults with RHD who can perform well on implicit assessments of language processing often have difficulty with metalinguistic assessments of the same processing operations2
Verbal morphology in agrammatic and anomic aphasia: comparison of structured vs. narrative elicitation tasks
No full textIndividuals with agrammatic aphasia show difficulty producing verb morphology (Arabatzi & Edwards, 2008). Various tasks ranging from spontaneous speech to constrained sentence level tasks have been used to detail these deficits and various subsets of verb inflections have been tested, resulting in mixed findings (see Lee, Milman, & Thompson, 2008 for review). In studies comparing production of finite (e.g., walks, walked) vs. nonfinite inflection forms (e.g., walking, to walk), agrammatic speakers show omission and substitution of finite tense markings in the face of relatively preserved nonfinite forms (e.g., LaPointe, 1985; Lee et al., 2008). However, little is known about verbal morphology in fluent aphasic speakers. Recently, Bastiaanse (2011) reported that fluent aphasic individuals may also experience greater difficulty with finite compared to nonfinite verbs in spontaneous speech.
Despite the frequently observed verb morphology deficits in individuals with aphasia, no assessment tool is available for clinical or research purposes to quantify these deficits. In addition, little attention has been paid to the effects of different elicitation tasks on verb inflection deficits in aphasia. In this study, we examined production of verb inflection in agrammatic and anomic aphasia using two different elicitation methods: structured sentence completion and narrative production tasks. For the structured task, we used the Northwestern Assessment of Verb Inflection (NAVI; Lee & Thompson, experimental version), which was developed to assess both finite and nonfinite forms in English, using a sentence completion task. For the narrative task, we used the Cinderella story, one of the most commonly used tasks for eliciting narrative speech samples in aphasia research
Information exchange in chatroom conversations of people with and without traumatic brain injury (TBI)
No full textThis study describes how people with and without traumatic brain injury (TBI) exchange information in small chatroom groups. Each of the ten participants with moderate-severe TBI and twelve control participants conversed with two unknown communication partners in a moderated chatroom on two occasions. Rates of information exchange were measured. Statistically significant differences were found in the: (1) frequency of information requests made by TBI participants and (2) frequency of information giving and negotiation/repair by communication partners of TBI participants (both reduced in the TBI group). Further research is required to validate results and explore the impact of alternate chatroom compositions