Analysis and Remediation of Language Production

描述(由申请人提供)：大约每250名美国人中就有一人患有失语症。在大多数情况下，用语言交流能力的下降代表着自给自足的灾难性丧失，也是严重社会孤立的根源。到目前为止，还没有报道的失语症治疗方法确实带来了语言产生的变化，语言产生从高度受限的实验室任务，如单一图片描述，转移到更具挑战性和社会功能的任务，如产生完整的叙述。目前的医疗环境限制了言语治疗的机会，因此必须开发治疗方法，使患者能够在密集的独立家庭实践中补充1：1的临床治疗。我们已经开发了两个计算机程序来解决失语症有效治疗的需求，这些治疗可以半独立使用。一种是交流系统(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，重放这些单词或短语，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事。另一种程序是一种语言治疗系统(TS)，它融合了语音识别和自然语言理解技术，使计算机能够‘理解’患者的口头句子，并就其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。这个项目的目标是：(1)复制试验结果，显示使用CS的失语症患者的语言产出明显更具结构性，并将这些影响与受试者的语言处理障碍的特征联系起来(Exp。1)；(2)评估通过为更严重的受损患者提供寻词支持来增强CS的影响(Exp.2)；(3)复制使用TS和CS改善失语症患者口语产出的先导研究的积极结果，并使用TS对受试者进行语法结构方面的培训，以测试关于短期记忆受损对失语症产出的影响的具体假设(实验。3)；和(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(Exp.4)。从这些研究中获得的信息将为进一步发展新的、理论上有动力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.