Twenty mid-stage Alzheimer's patients at the Jewish Home and Hospital in the Bronx participatedfor 12 weeks each in four groups offive in a five-day-a-week program of structured multi-modality group communication intervention called “The Breakfast Club.” Twenty matched patients participated in a standard conversation group and served as controls. The Breakfast Club attempted to incorporate all that was currently known about the residual communication strengths of Alzheimer's patients and about previous treatments shown to be effective with this population. Results showed that Breakfast Club participants improved significantly on measures of language performance, functional independence and use of social communication while control subjects did not. Breakfast Club members also showed significant increases in “interest and involvement” and the use of procedural memories over the 12-week period.

This study sought to determine whether the incidence of perseveration in the responses of adult aphasics could be affected by altering stimulus factors such as semantic difficulty and the rate of presentation of stimuli. Thirty-one aphasic men supplied 1-word responses within three randomly arranged language tasks: sentence completion, picture naming, and word reading. Within each task subjects received stimuli from two 20-word lists of words contrasted for their frequency of occurrence in the language. Each list was presented once with 1-sec intervals between subjects' responses and subsequent stimuli, and once with 10-sec intervals. Results indicated that when semantic difficulty as measured by the frequency of occurrence of the single-word responses was reduced, the mean number of perseverations decreased significantly. When time intervals were increased from 1 to 10 seconds, perseverations decreased significantly. Sentence completion and picture naming elicited significantly more perseverations than word reading. Perseveration and other verbal errors were similarly affected by the variable of semantic difficulty, but only perseverative errors were significantly reduced when time intervals were increased. Word length, presentation order of tasks and conditions, and time postonset of aphasia appeared to have little relationship to perseveration.

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