Analysis and Remediation of Language Production

语言产生的分析和修复

• 批准号: 6610776
• 负责人: Rita Sloan Berndt
• 金额: $ 39.8万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND BALTIMORE
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2003
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2003-05-02 至 2008-02-29
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/6610776
• 关键词: aphasia; behavioral /social science research tag; clinical research; communication disorder aid; computer assisted instruction; computer assisted patient care; computer human interaction; computer program /software; computer system design /evaluation; human subject; human therapy evaluation; language development; neural information processing; psycholinguistics; short term memory; speech; speech recognition; speech therapy

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Aphasia strikes approximately one in 250 Americans. The reduced ability to communicate with language represents, in most cases, a catastrophic loss of self-sufficiency and a source of profound social isolation. No treatment for aphasia reported to date has reliably brought about changes in language production that migrate from highly constrained laboratory tasks such as single picture description to more challenging and socially functional tasks such as the production of entire narratives. The current climate in health care limits access to speech therapy, and thus it is imperative to develop approaches to treatment which allow patients to supplement 1:1 clinical treatment with intensive independent home practice. We have developed two computer programs to address the need for effective aphasia treatments that can be used semi-independently. One is a communication system (CS), which allows aphasic users to record spoken sentences a single word or phrase at a time, to replay these words or phrases, and to build them into sentences and narratives by manipulating visual icons on a computer screen. The other program is a language therapy system (TS) incorporating speech recognition and natural language understanding technology, which allows the computer to 'understand' the patient's spoken sentence and to provide feedback about whether it correctly describes a picture on the screen. This allows independent home practice of spoken language. The goals of this project are: (1) to replicate pilot results showing measurably more structured language production by aphasic patients using the CS, and to link these effects to characteristics of subjects' language processing impairments (Exp. 1); (2) to assess the impact of enhancing the CS with word-finding support for more severely impaired patients (Exp. 2); (3) to replicate the positive outcomes in pilot studies which used the TS and CS to improve aphasic patients' spoken language production, and to use the TS to train subjects on grammatical structures that provide tests of specific hypotheses about the impact of impaired short term memory on aphasic production (Exp. 3); and (4) to use data automatically collected by the CS to investigate the nature of the underlying disruption and to motivate the most effective approaches to remediation (Exp. 4). Information obtained from these studies will provide a basis for the further development of novel, theoretically motivated approaches to aphasia treatment.

描述（由申请人提供）：大约 250 名美国人中就有 1 人患有失语症。在大多数情况下，语言交流能力的下降意味着自给自足的灾难性丧失，也是严重社会孤立的根源。迄今为止，没有报道的失语症治疗方法能够可靠地带来语言产生的变化，这种变化从高度受限的实验室任务（例如单一图片描述）转变为更具挑战性和社会功能的任务（例如整个叙述的产生）。当前的医疗保健环境限制了言语治疗的获得，因此必须开发治疗方法，使患者能够通过强化独立家庭实践补充 1:1 临床治疗。我们开发了两个计算机程序来满足可以半独立使用的有效失语症治疗的需求。一种是通信系统（CS），它允许失语症用户一次记录一个单词或短语的口语句子，重播这些单词或短语，并通过操纵计算机屏幕上的视觉图标将它们构建成句子和叙述。另一个程序是结合了语音识别和自然语言理解技术的语言治疗系统（TS），它允许计算机“理解”患者所说的句子，并提供有关其是否正确描述屏幕上的图片的反馈。这允许独立的家庭口语练习。该项目的目标是：（1）复制试点结果，显示失语症患者使用 CS 的语言产生可测量地更加结构化，并将这些影响与受试者语言处理障碍的特征联系起来（实验 1）； (2) 评估通过单词查找支持增强 CS 对更严重受损患者的影响（实验 2）； (3) 复制试点研究中的积极成果，这些研究使用 TS 和 CS 来改善失语症患者的口语产生，并使用 TS 来训练受试者的语法结构，从而提供有关短期记忆受损对失语症产生影响的具体假设的测试（实验 3）； (4) 使用 CS 自动收集的数据来调查潜在中断的性质并激发最有效的补救方法（实验 4）。从这些研究中获得的信息将为进一步开发新颖的、有理论依据的失语症治疗方法奠定基础。