1666 research outputs found
Sort by
Acquisition and generalization responses in aphasia treatment: Evidence from sentence-production treatment
No full textTreatment of Underlying Forms (TUF) promotes not only acquisition of treated sentence types but also generalization to related but untreated sentences (e.g., Thompson, Shapiro, Kiran & Sobecks, 2003). In a meta-analysis examining TUF treatment outcomes, Dickey and Yoo (2010) found evidence that the factors governing TUF acquisition and generalization may be different. They found that general auditory comprehension ability but not overall aphasia severity or sentence-comprehension impairment predicted participants’ acquisition of treated sentences. In contrast, none of these factors were related to participants’ generalization to related but untreated sentences. Interestingly, Meinzer and colleagues (2010) found similar results for naming treatment: brain areas that were positively related to acquiring treated items were not associated with generalization to untreated words.
These findings suggest that the mechanisms responsible for acquisition and generalization responses to aphasia treatment may be distinct. The current study examined this question further by testing the dose-response relationships for TUF, for both acquisition and generalization. It analyzed existing TUF treatment studies by using multilevel generalized linear regression to model changes in probe accuracy over the course of treatment. One model estimated the slope and intercept of acquisition and generalization curves in response to increasing amounts of treatment. A second set of models tested whether these dose-response relationships were moderated by aphasia severity (viz. Dickey & Yoo, 2010).
Determining whether acquisition and generalization curves exhibit similar slopes and intercepts, and whether they are moderated by the same factors, will help establish how similar the two treatment responses are. Comparing the slopes and intercepts of these curves can also shed light on whether similar amounts of treatment are needed to promote acquisition and generalization
The effects of semantic and orthographic blocking on written word production
Full text linkIn investigating the efficacy of acquired dysgraphia treatments, relatively little attention has been directed to the relationships amongst treated items. Is it beneficial or detrimental to treat together items that belong to the same semantic category or share segments (phonemes or letters)?
In spoken production, interference is observed when individuals produce items in the context of other semantically related vs. unrelated items—neurologically normal participants initiate naming more slowly and individuals with aphasia produce more errors (e.g. Damian et al., 2001; Schnur et al., 2006). On the other hand, facilitation is observed for the production of blocks of phonologically related vs. unrelated items— normal participants initiate naming more quickly (e.g. Damian, 2003), although there is some evidence of interference in individuals with aphasia (Hodgson et al., 2005).
In the present study, we extend this research to examine the effects of semantic and orthographic blocking on written production in neurologically intact individuals (Experiments 1A and 1B) as well as one individual with acquired dysgraphia (Experiment 2). While the investigation does not involve treatment, the findings may have implications for word retrieval treatment
The Effect of Contextual Bias on the Production of Negative Emotion Words in Patients with Right Hemisphere Brain Damage
No full textPrevious research has shown that damage to the right cerebral hemisphere (RHD) often manifests as higher-level cognitive-linguistic problems in domains such as emotion processing1,2,3,6,10,14. However, these studies employ metalinguistic tasks that obscure the nature of processing strengths and weaknesses because of the relatively high cognitive processing demand. Individuals with RHD often do not appear to have substantial deficits, and in fact facilitative effects have been observed8,16,17,20, when they are assessed in a manner that reduces this demand, via methods such as priming or contextual bias.
The current study investigated the effect of contextual bias on the production of emotions conveyed via video input in individuals with RHD. Prior work reported adults with RHD deficient in producing negative emotion words in narrated descriptions of a video stimulus6. By inducing a negatively-toned bias prior to the video description task, we expected that negative affect words would increase in RHD subjects’ descriptions, as compared to their descriptions when no bias was induced. We also expected non-brain-damaged (NBD) control participants to use more negative affect words than participants with RHD in a No-Bias Condition, with this between-group difference decreasing in the Bias Condition. No differences were expected between conditions on a control measure, the use of motion words
Nonverbal Working Memory as a Predictor of Anomia Treatment Success: Preliminary Data
No full textIt has been well established that individuals with aphasia tend to have difficulty with nonverbal working memory (Lang & Quitz, 2012; Maher & Murray, 2012; Wright & Fergadiotis, 2012) that can influence linguistic and nonlinguistic processing. The extent to which these working memory deficits impact recovery from aphasia is still under investigation.
From a clinical standpoint, the relationship between nonverbal working memory and response to aphasia treatment may hold prognostic value in predicting those individuals who will respond best to a particular type of treatment. To obtain this clinical goal, it will be necessary to assess the reliability of working memory tasks in individuals with aphasia (Mayer & Murray, 2012) because of high variability in performance across sessions in this population.
The purpose of the study was threefold; (1) to identify the extent to which nonverbal working memory performance, as measured by the spatial span (SS) task (Wechsler, 1997), was reliable across multiple testing sessions in individuals with aphasia, (2) to determine if Cued Picture Naming Treatment (CPNT) impacted performance on the SS task, and (3) to determine the degree to which nonverbal working memory, as measured by the SS task, predicted response to anomia treatment in individuals with chronic aphasia
Effects of increased memory load on short-term facilitation of repetition in persons with aphasia
Full text linkThe ability to repeat a word involves activation of phonological and semantic representations of words that must be maintained until the utterance is produced. In aphasia, the language and verbal STM impairment frequently co-occur and studies indicate that the severity of these impairments are highly correlated (Martin & Ayala, 2004). One account of this co-occurrence is that the word processing impairment in aphasia is due to an inability to maintain activation of semantic and phonological representations of words over the time course of comprehending, repeating, or producing a word. When severe, this impairment affects single and multiple word processing as well as verbal STM capacity, as measured by verbal span. When milder, the impairment affects multiple word processing and verbal STM capacity. This intimate relationship of lexical access/retrieval and the ability to maintain activation of a word’s representations suggests a need to consider the role of verbal memory load on language performance. For example, it has been shown recently that performance on semantic judgment tasks is significantly reduced when memory load on the task is increased (Martin, Kohen, Kalinyak-Fliszar, Soveri & Laine, 2012). This study also identified two factors contributing to this effect, semantic STM capacity and an executive function, inhibition (performance on the Simon Task). Additionally, it has been shown that performance on phonological and lexical-semantic tasks is compromised by imposing an interval between stimulus and response (Martin, Kohen & Kalinayk-Fliszar, 2010; Martin, 2012).
Evidence that increased memory load impairs language performance has prompted some researchers to target the ability to tolerate increased memory load in language tasks as a means of improving language function as well as increasing verbal STM capacity. For example, Majerus, Van der Kaa, Renard, Van der Linden, & Poncelet (2005) treated a phonological STM deficit using delayed repetition of word pairs. There were improvements in digit and nonword span, nonword repetition, rhyme judgments, and by the client’s self-report, comprehension in conversational contexts. Fridriksson, Holland, Beeson, & Morrow (2005) treated three cases of anomia using spaced-retrieval treatment, which varied interval time between presentations of a picture to be named (more time when named correctly and less time when named incorrectly). Compared to a cueing hierarchy treatment, the spaced retrieval approach showed more lasting improvements in follow-up testing. Kalinyak-Fliszar, Kohen & Martin (2011) used nonword and multisyllabic word repetition tasks combined with a delayed response (5 seconds) to improve phonological abilities of a person with conduction aphasia. Improvements were noted in repetition of treated stimuli and other language and verbal STM measures: rhyming and synonymy judgments, word pair repetition and seven verbal span tasks (of eleven administered).
These studies indicate that incorporation of variations in verbal memory load into language treatments can improve language function. However, it has not been demonstrated that the addition of STM load provides any greater benefit over and above the language treatment task. In this study, we use a short-term repetition facilitation paradigm to determine if increased memory load added to a repetition task improves performance more than repetition alone
Using Virtual Clinicians to Promote Functional Communication Skills in Aphasia
No full textPersons with aphasia (PWA) re-enter their community after their rehabilitation program is ended. Thus it is incumbent on rehabilitation specialists to incorporate training in using residual language skills for functional communication [1]. Evidence indicates that language abilities improve with continued treatment, even during chronic stages of aphasia (refs) For optimal generalization, PWA need to practice language in everyday living situations.
Virtual reality technology is a method of providing home-based therapeutic interventions. A valuable potential of virtual reality technology is that it supports the successful generalization of residual language skills to functional communication situations. Traditionally, role-playing [2] and script training [3] have been used to improve functional communication in PWA. A more recent approach has been the adaptation of scripts through the implementation of virtual technology. [4].
We report progress on a project that aims to develop a virtual clinician that is capable of recognizing a variety of potential responses in the context of functional communication scenarios. Our goal is to develop a virtual clinician-human interaction system that can be used independently by PWA to practice and improve communication skills. This involves development of software that will support a spoken dialog system (SDS) that can interact autonomously with an individual and can be configured to personalize treatment [5].
As use of virtual technology in aphasia rehabilitation increases, questions about the physical and psychosocial factors that influence successful use of residual communication skills need to be resolved. Thus, a second aim of this project, the topic of this paper, is to determine whether interactive dialogues between a client and virtual clinician differ in the quantity and quality of the client’s language output compared to dialogues between client and human clinician. Although the potential of using virtual clinicians is promising, it must be determined if individuals with aphasia (or other language disorder) will be responsive to the virtual clinician and produce as much language in this context as they would during dialogues with human clinicians.
We addressed two hypotheses in this study:
1. For PWA, practice with dialogues that focus on everyday activities will improve quality and quantity of verbal output in those dialogues.
2. For PWA, verbal output practiced in dialogues with a virtual clinician and a human clinician will yield similar amounts of verbal output as measured by information units in the dialogues
Core Lexicon and Main Concept Production during Picture Description
No full textDiscourse is a highly complex and individualized communication act wherein individuals not only transmit and receive information for survival and cooperation, but also use spoken language for ritual purposes (e.g., relationships, fellowship, co-participation; Carey, 1988; Dimbleby & Burton, 1998). Discourse in typical and clinical populations has been investigated with a variety of structuralist, functionalist, and hybrid techniques (see Armstrong, 2000), and is known to be a good predictor of quality of life and life participation in persons with aphasia (PWAs). Discourse analysis, however, generally requires specialized training and can be time-consuming. MacWhinney, Fromm Holland, Forbes, & Wright (2010) suggested that analysis of a core lexicon during structured narrative tasks could provide a time-efficient and informative index of functional communication abilities. For example, clinicians could bypass lengthy transcriptions, instead generating a list of words spoken during narration for later comparison to a core lexicon (CoreLex). Using various methods, CoreLex has so far been investigated for the Cinderella story, a monologic story retell narrative task (Author1, Dillow, & Author2, 2013; MacWhinney et al., 2010) and a procedural narrative task where patients describe how to make a PB&J sandwich (Fromm, Forbes, Holland, & MacWhinney, 2013). CoreLex performance is strongly correlated with main concept (MC) production, a measure of narrative adequacy, during Cinderella retelling (Author1, Dillow, & Author2, 2013). Similar investigations for other narrative tasks are needed. The aims of this study were to 1) determine the CoreLex of a picture sequence description task included in the AphasiaBank protocol (Breaking Window), 2) calculate a CoreLex score for controls and PWAs, and 3) determine how well CoreLex predicts narrative adequacy, as judged by MC analysis
Outcomes from an intensive comprehensive aphasia program (ICAP): A retrospective look
No full textIntensive comprehensive aphasia programs (ICAPs) are increasingly sought-after by consumers. It is important to examine outcomes from this unique clinical service model to determine feasibility, effectiveness, and potentially, to determine profiles of patient recovery. This poster presents retrospective data from first time participants in one ICAP over a 5 year period. Findings demonstrate significant improvements on language and activity/participation measures from pre-treatment to post-treatment