Background The efficacy of telerehabilitation-based treatment for anomia has been demonstrated in post-stroke aphasia, but the efficacy of this method of anomia treatment delivery has not been established within the context of degenerative illness. Aims The current study evaluated the feasibility and efficacy of a telerehabilitation-based approach to anomia treatment within the three subtypes of primary progressive aphasia (PPA). Methods & Procedures Each of the three telerehabilitation participants represented a distinct subtype of PPA. Following a baseline evaluation of language and cognition, a phonological treatment and an orthographic treatment were administered to all participants over the course of six months. One month after the end of treatment, a post-treatment evaluation began. All treatment sessions and the majority of the evaluation sessions were administered via telerehabilitation. Treatment effects were examined within each subject, and treatment effects were also compared between each telerehabilitation participant and a group of in-person participants who had the same subtype of PPA. Outcomes & Results All three telerehabilitation participants exhibited positive treatment effects. CGR (nonfluent/agrammatic variant PPA) and WCH (logopenic variant PPA) showed maintenance of naming for prophylaxis items in both treatment conditions, while ACR (semantic variant PPA) demonstrated increased naming of remediation items in the phonological treatment condition. Compared to in-person participants with the same subtype of PPA, each of the telerehabilitation participants typically showed effects that were either within the expected range or larger than expected. Conclusions Telerehabilitation-based anomia treatment is feasible and effective in all three subtypes of PPA.

Linguistic units are organized at multiple levels: words combine to form phrases, which combine to form sentences. Ding, Melloni, Zhang, Tian, and Poeppel (2016) discovered that the brain tracks units at each level of hierarchical structure simultaneously. Such tracking requires knowledge of how words and phrases are structurally related. Here we asked how neural tracking emerges as knowledge of phrase structure is acquired. We recorded electrophysiological (MEG) data while adults listened to a miniature language with distributional cues to phrase structure or to a control language which lacked the crucial distributional cues. Neural tracking of phrases developed rapidly, only in the condition in which participants formed mental representations of phrase structure as measured behaviorally. These results illuminate the mechanisms through which abstract mental representations are acquired and processed by the brain.

The wanna facts are a classic Poverty of Stimulus (PoS) problem: wanna is grammatical in certain contexts (Who do you want PRO to play with?) but not others (Who do you want who to play with you?). On a standard analysis, “contraction” to wanna is blocked by some empty constituents (WH-copies) but not others (PRO). All empty constituents are inaudible, so it has been unclear how restrictions on them could be learned. Children’s reported knowledge of the wanna facts (Crain & Thornton, 1998) has therefore been attributed to a principle of Universal Grammar (UG). In two experiments, we demonstrate that children’s use of wanna is not in fact adultlike and that error rates are modulated by the frequency of the embedded verb (play above). These results suggest that if there is a UG principle, children appear not to know that it is relevant, raising important questions about what learning mechanisms enable children to circumvent the input’s apparent poverty.

A growing body of literature supports the effectiveness of the remote delivery of rehabilitation services, i.e., telerehab. Aphasia treatment is particularly well suited for telerehab because of the verbal and visual nature of speech-language therapy, but scientific research investigating aphasia telerehab is in its infancy. No studies to date have evaluated whether treatment of acquired reading disorders by a live clinician can be feasibly, effectively, or efficiently conducted via telerehab. Here we address this gap in the literature by reporting our success remotely remediating the reading deficits of two participants with phonologic alexia. We adapted for the telerehab setting a previously validated treatment for phonologic alexia (Friedman, Sample, & Lott, 2002), which uses a paired-associate design to train reading of problematic words. Both telerehab participants significantly improved their reading of trained words in similar time frames as previous participants (Friedman et al., 2002; Kurland et al., 2008; Lott, Sample, Oliver, Lacey, & Friedman, 2008); furthermore, both participants reported high satisfaction with the telerehab setting. Although telerehab with alexic patients poses unique challenges, we conclude that treatment for alexia via telerehab is nevertheless feasible, may be equally effective as in-person treatment, and saves substantial resources for participants as well as clinicians.

No abstract