Working Memory Treatment for an Individual with Chronic Aphasia: A Case Study

Abstract

Working memory (WM) is defined as a storage system limited in its capacity and involved in maintaining and manipulating information over short periods of time (Baddeley, 2003). In WM tasks, individuals are required to simultaneously store certain items in memory while updating the contents of their WM. It has been proposed that WM interacts with language abilities and deficits in WM influence language performance (Baddeley, 2003; Carpenter, & Just, 1989; Murray, 2012). Importantly, individuals with aphasia often show WM and short-term memory (STM) deficits, which may negatively affect language symptoms and recovery, and accordingly WM treatment may represent an efficient approach to addressing these individuals’ cognitive and linguistic impairments (Kalinyak-Fliszar, Kohen, & Martin, 2011; Murray, 2012; Martin et al., 2012). WM treatment for individuals with aphasia, however, has not yet been intensively studied (Murray, 2012). Previous results indicate that WM in individuals with aphasia can be improved with training (e.g., Kalinyak-Fliszar et al., 2011; Mayer & Murray, 2002; Vallat et al., 2005). Nonetheless, variable amounts of generalization to language abilities and types of untrained cognitive and linguistic functions responding to the WM treatment have been reported. Accordingly, to examine further the potential of WM training to remediate the cognitive-linguistic symptoms of individuals with aphasia, we administered a treatment with tasks designed not only to target WM skills but also semantic processing, the linguistic ability most compromised in our aphasic participant. The research questions were: a) Would our participant with chronic aphasia demonstrate improved WM through treatment? b) Would our participant demonstrate improved language performance given WM tasks that involved verbal stimuli