TREATMENT OF SENTENCE PROCESSING DISORDERS IN APHASIA

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

A body of research-to which the PI and Co-PI have been major contributors-implicates a syntax-to-semantics mapping deficit as a core feature in the grammatical disorder of nonfluent, Broca's aphasics. Consequently, our team of neurolinguists and speech-language pathologists has sought to develop treatment protocols that target mapping operations, along with verb retrieval operations that bear directly on mapping. Our preliminary successes reinforce the belief that treatments motivated by neurolinguistic findings and directed at components deficits have an important role to play in the clinical management of aphasic patients. Properly designed and adequately tested, such treatments may comprise the modular building blocks of programs for the rehabilitation of complex linguistic skills like oral production. This 'modular treatments' theme is elaborated in this 3-part proposal in accordance with the following specific aims: Part I: To compare the efficacy of two treatments for agrammatism-syntax stimulation and mapping therapy-which target different neurolinguistic operations; and to examine the efficacy of ordered combinations of the two treatments. Part II: To continue the development of a verb treatment program which simultaneously encourages lexico-semantic, syntactic, and phonological processing of verbs in sentence contexts; to manipulate 'depth of processing' of verb meaning as an independent variable in such treatment; Part IIl: To promote carry-over of treatment effects, and hence more functional outcomes, by means of a step-wise generalization training module aimed at bridging the gap between constrained and naturalistic oral production tasks;