Five cbronically aphasic subjects were trained on a computerized iconographic communication system (C-VIC). Their performance in producing single sentences scripts. and narratives was assessed using both spoken English and C-VIC. The requisite vocabulary necessary and the narrative complexity of the target productions were controlled. Subject performance using C-VIC indicates that the ability to construct discourse at the macrostructural level is largely intact. Despite significant improvements in spoken production after C-VIC training, especially at the single sentence level, the subjects' spoken discourse remains severely impaired by their failures at the microlinguistic level. These results point to the limits of currently available approaches to the remediation of aphasia and suggest avenues for future research.
We used a single-subject research design to examine long-term maintenance of treatment gains in a severely aphasic patient. We used a well-defined therapy protocol [i.e., Computerized Visual Communication System (C-VIC) training] to target production of tense morphology and an assessment specifically designed to measure improvements in the targeted behavior. We first trained Subject #1, a 65-year-old man with a severe nonfluent aphasia, to produce simple subject-verb-object sentences, then tense-marked sentences. Remarkable improvement was shown and was maintained five months after training was terminated. Sixteen months later, he maintained only the ability to produce trained root verb forms. A second training was initiated to examine the parameters of training that affect maintenance. Maintenance was demonstrated up to a year after termination of treatment. We attribute Subject #1's maintained performance to his continued involvement in general C-VIC sentence level therapy following tense training.
Restricted semantic fields and resultant stimulus overselectivity are often thought to be typical of low-functioning autism, as is a strong visual processing preference. However, these conclusions may in part be an artifact of testing methodology. A 12-year-old, low-functioning and nonverbal autistic boy was tested on an auditory word-to-picture selection task. The picture foils were chosen to have visual features, semantic features, both, or neither in common with the correct answer. Errors were made more often to semantically than to visually related items, and he showed generalization to items that had not been explicitly trained. This is taken as evidence that his semantic fields are broader than otherwise apparent, and that he was capable of expanding his semantic representations independently of specific training.
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