Mapping therapy for sentence production impairments in nonfluent aphasia

Abstract

This study investigated a new treatment in which sentence production abilities were trained in a small group of individuals and nonfluent aphasia. It was based upon a mapping therapy approach which holds that sentence production and comprehension impairments are due to difficulties in mapping between the meaning form (thematic roles) and the syntactic form of sentences. We trained production of both canonical and noncanonical reversible sentences. Three patients received treatment and two served as control participants. Patients who received treatment demonstrated acquisition of all trained sentence structures. They also demonstrated across-task generalisation of treated and some untreated sentence structures on two tasks of constrained sentence production, and showed some improvements on a narrative task. One control participant improved on some of these measures and the other did not. There was no noted improvement in sentence comprehension abilities following treatment. Results are discussed with reference to the heterogeneity of underlying impairments in sentence production impairments in nonfluent patients, and the possible mechanisms by which improvement in sentence production might have been achieved in treatment.

Grammatical Planning Units During Real-Time Sentence Production in Speakers With Agrammatic Aphasia and Healthy Speakers

“…For targeting lexicalization and linear ordering of words, a treatment regimen utilizing a smaller planning unit of information, such as a single word or phrase, may lead to improved production. For deficits in functional structure generation, utilizing a structural linking on the basis of VAS may be helpful, as shown in previous treatment studies (Rochon, Laird, Bose, & Scofield, 2005;Thompson, 2007;Thompson, Riley, den Ouden, Meltzer-Asscher, & Lukic, 2013).…”

Effect of treatment for bilingual individuals with aphasia: A systematic review of the evidence

“…A few other studies reported parametric statistical tests whose assumptions of normality and independence were not met by the study design and data. McNemar's change test is a non-parametric test for paired nominal measures such as accuracy data, and has been used by several aphasiologists to compute statistical significance of treatment-induced changes in behavioral scores (Faroqi-Shah, 2008;Rochon, Laird, Bose, & Scofield, 2005). The use of a consistent statistical measure makes comparisons of statistical significance across studies more valid.…”

Structurally well-formed narrative production in the face of severe conceptual deterioration: A longitudinal case study of a woman with semantic dementia

“…The QPA was carried out on each participant's first 150 narrative words (plus or minus 10). Similar to Schwartz, Saffran, Fink, Myers, and Martin (1994) and Rochon, Laird, Bose, and Scofield (2005) selected indices were divided into three main categories: syntactic, morphological, and lexical.…”