Analysis and Remediation of Language Production

描述（由申请人提供）：每250个美国人中就有1人患有失语症。在大多数情况下，语言交流能力的下降是自给自足的灾难性丧失，是严重的社会孤立的根源。迄今为止，还没有报道过失语症的治疗方法能够可靠地改变语言生产，从高度受限的实验室任务（如单幅图片描述）转移到更具挑战性和社会功能的任务（如完整叙述的生产）。目前的卫生保健环境限制了语言治疗的可及性，因此必须开发治疗方法，允许患者以密集的独立家庭实践补充1:1的临床治疗。我们已经开发了两个计算机程序，以解决有效的失语症治疗的需要，可以半独立使用。一种是交流系统（CS），它允许失语症患者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。另一个项目是语言治疗系统（TS），它结合了语音识别和自然语言理解技术，使计算机能够“理解”病人的口语句子，并就它是否正确地描述了屏幕上的图片提供反馈。这样就可以在家里独立练习口语。该项目的目标是：(1)复制试验结果，显示失语患者使用CS可测量地产生更结构化的语言，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)评估用找词支持增强CS对重度受损患者的影响（实验2）；(3)复制使用TS和CS改善失语症患者口语产生的初步研究的积极结果，并使用TS对受试者进行语法结构训练，为短期记忆受损对失语症产生的影响的特定假设提供测试（实验3）；(4)使用CS自动收集的数据来调查潜在中断的性质，并激励最有效的补救方法（实验4）。从这些研究中获得的信息将为进一步开发新的、理论上有动机的失语症治疗方法提供基础。

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.