A Multimedia Presentation System for the Remediation of Sentence Processing Deficits

This work builds on an earlier study in which clinical use of software known as Microworld for Aphasia led to significant and durable improvements in the written sentence comprehension of a number of long-term aphasic subjects. This follow-on study was undertaken with two main objectives: a) to re-design the software, making it easier for clinicians to create exercises and review performance data; and b) to explore the contributions of computer and clinician to the previous results. We describe the architecture of the resulting system, Multimedia Microworld, which is novel in its use of a single multimedia grammar and lexicon from which text, speech and graphics are assembled. The system has been evaluated with three aphasic subjects and the results corroborate the earlier findings regarding efficacy. In this recent work, however, we have demonstrated statistically significant improvements using a treatment protocol that could be self-administered, or used with the help of a carer