Analysis and Remediation of Language Production

语言产生的分析和修复

• 批准号: 6889541
• 负责人: Rita Sloan Berndt
• 金额: $ 35.34万
• 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/6889541
• 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，用语言交流的能力下降意味着自给自足的灾难性损失，也是社会严重孤立的根源。迄今为止，没有报道的失语症治疗可靠地带来了语言生产的变化，从高度限制的实验室任务，如单一的图片描述迁移到更具挑战性和社会功能的任务，如整个叙述的生产。目前的卫生保健环境限制了语言治疗的使用，因此必须开发治疗方法，使患者能够通过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，以满足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述。另一个程序是一个语言治疗系统（TS），它结合了语音识别和自然语言理解技术，允许计算机“理解”患者所说的句子，并提供关于它是否正确描述屏幕上图片的反馈。这允许独立的家庭口语练习。该项目的目标是：（1）复制试验结果，显示失语症患者使用CS的语言产生可测量的结构化程度更高，并将这些效果与受试者的语言加工障碍特征联系起来（实验1）。1）;（2）评估对更严重受损患者使用单词查找支持增强CS的影响（实验1）。2）、（3）复制使用TS和CS来改善失语症患者的口语产生的试点研究中的积极结果，并使用TS来训练受试者的语法结构，这些语法结构提供了关于受损的短期记忆对失语症产生的影响的特定假设的测试（Exp. 3）、以及（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开发新的、理论上有动机的失语症治疗方法提供基础。