The impact of dose on naming accuracy with persons with aphasia

Background: Although aphasia rehabilitation has been shown to be efficacious, many questions remain regarding how best to deliver treatment to maximise functional gains for persons with aphasia. Treatment-delivery variables, such as intensity and dosage, are likely to influence both behavioural and structural changes during anomia treatment. While numerous protocols have concluded that treatment intensity positively impacts functional outcomes, few studies to date have examined the role that dose plays in patient outcomes for anomia treatment. Aims: This study sought to investigate how manipulating dose of repeated confrontation naming within sessions influences naming in persons with aphasia. Repeated practice of confrontation naming, without feedback, was hypothesised to improve trained but not untrained words, to be persistent after withdrawal, and to be sensitive to the number of trials (i.e., dose) within sessions. Methods and Procedures: A single-subject ABA design, with replication across seven participants with aphasia, was used to investigate the influence of repeated confrontation naming attempts on the acquisition and maintenance of trained pictures relative to untrained pictures. Training involved repeated attempts to name pictures, along with repeated exposure to pictures of objects (nouns) and their names, without feedback. The primary independent variable was within session dose; the dependent variable was naming accuracy. Outcomes and Results: Naming accuracy improved for all participants for trained pictures across both acquisition and maintenance phases per visual inspection; such positive effects were not observed for untrained pictures. Effect-size calculations indicate that three of seven participants demonstrated considerable change for trained items, while one of seven participants demonstrated meaningful change for untrained items. The high-dose condition elicited small effect sizes for one participant, and large effect sizes for two of seven participants, while the low-dose condition elicited small and medium effect sizes for two of seven participants. Conclusions: Participants across a variety of aphasia severity levels responded positively to two doses of repeated confrontation naming practice, without feedback, across phases of this naming protocol. Results are in line with principles of neuroplasticity and demonstrate that repeated practice, without feedback, can produce significant and persistent changes in naming ability for some persons with aphasia

Effect of Feedback Frequency on Motor Learning in Individuals with Apraxia of Speech and Healthy Adults

It is well documented in limb motor learning literature that providing the optimal practice and feedback conditions is critical for the learning of new movements in healthy adults. However, it remains unclear if the conditions used for training limb movements can be directly applied to the speech motor system of healthy adults and individuals with acquired motor speech disorders. Collectively, these practice and feedback conditions are known as the Principles of Motor Learning (PML; Schmidt, 1988). These principles can be used to guide the structure of practice as well as the nature of feedback, and can have considerable implications for an individual’s ability to learn, recall, and maintain skilled movements

Contextual Influences on Judgements of Emotionally Ambiguous Stimuli by Brain-Damaged and Normally Aging Adults

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The Psychosocial Outcomes of Stroke: A Longitudinal Study of Depression Risk

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The effects of concurrent picture presentations on retelling of orally presented stories by adults with aphasia

This study investigated whether measures of verbal productivity, verbal disruption, information content, grammatical complexity, and grammatical well formedness would vary as a function of experimental conditions in which the presence of pictured stimuli was manipulated during the oral presentation and retelling of stories. Fifteen adults with aphasia retold stories under three experimental conditions: (i) concurrent presentation of oral and pictured versions of stories followed by a picture-supported retell, (ii) concurrent presentation of oral and pictured versions of stories followed by a 'free' retell, and (iii) orally presented stories followed by a free retell. Group analyses revealed no significant differences across experimental conditions for any of the dependent measures. Analyses of individual subjects' data revealed clinically important differences for several measures of information content, with individual subjects responding differently to the experimental conditions

The relationship between non-orthographic language abilities and reading performance in chronic aphasia : an exploration of the primary systems hypothesis

PURPOSE : This study investigated the relationship between non-orthographic language abilities and reading in order to examine assumptions of the primary systems hypothesis and further our understanding of language processing poststroke. METHOD : Performance on non-orthographic semantic, phonologic, and syntactic tasks, as well as oral reading and reading comprehension tasks, was assessed in 43 individuals with aphasia. Correlation and regression analyses were conducted to determine the relationship between these measures. In addition, analyses of variance examined differences within and between reading groups (within normal limits, phonological, deep, or global alexia). RESULTS : Results showed that non-orthographic language abilities were significantly related to reading abilities. Semantics was most predictive of regular and irregular word reading, whereas phonology was most predictive of pseudohomophone and nonword reading. Written word and paragraph comprehension were primarily supported by semantics, whereas written sentence comprehension was related to semantic, phonologic, and syntactic performance. Finally, severity of alexia was found to reflect severity of semantic and phonologic impairment. CONCLUSIONS : Findings support the primary systems view of language by showing that non-orthographic language abilities and reading abilities are closely linked. This preliminary work requires replication and extension; however, current results highlight the importance of routine, integrated assessment and treatment of spoken and written language in aphasia.The first author was supported by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation New Century Scholars Doctoral Scholarship and the University of Washington Research Training in Speech & Hearing Sciences National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders training grant (T32000033).https://pubs.asha.org/journal/jslhrhj2019Speech-Language Pathology and Audiolog

What Do Youth Service Librarians Need? Reassessing Goals and Curricula in the Context of Changing Information Needs and Behaviors of Youth

The ALISE Youth Services Special Interest Group (SIG) presents a panel that explores what “youth services” means in the context of LIS education today, including novel additions to youth services curricula and how the changing needs of youth impact LIS education. The session begins with five research presentations, followed by an open discussion and Q&A. The five presentations incorporate the following topics: critical youth information needs, methods of incorporating design thinking and interdisciplinary research into MLIS youth services courses, an investigation of dialogue between librarians and youth, and the role of family and community in youth information behavior. The discussion prompted by this scholarship serves as an important contribution to the continued reform and evolution of youth services education

The Communicative Informativeness and Efficiency of Connected Discourse by Adults With Aphasia Under Structured and Conversational Sampling Conditions

Measuring communicative informativeness under conversational discourse conditions is perhaps the most valid means of determining the interpersonal verbal communication abilities of aphasic adults. Nevertheless, the data derived from such analyses are expensive to collect and subject to unknown sources of variablity. In this study, samples of connected discourse were obtained from 20 aphasic subjects under narrative and conversational sampling conditions to determine the extent to which they were related on measures of communicative informativeness. Results revealed that subjects produced significantly greater percentages of informative words [i.e., correct information units (Nicholas & Brookshire, 1993b)] under conversational discourse conditions, but that the percentage of correct information units produced during narrative discourse tasks could be used to predict performance under conversational conditions with a high degree of accuracy

Speech serial control in healthy speakers and speakers with hypokinetic or ataxic dysarthria: Effects of sequence length and practice

The current study investigated the processes responsible for selection of sounds and syllables during production of speech sequences in 10 adults with hypokinetic dysarthria from Parkinson’s disease, 5 adults with ataxic dysarthria, and 14 healthy control speakers. Speech production data from a choice reaction time task were analyzed to evaluate the effects of sequence length and practice on speech sound sequencing. Speakers produced sequences that were between one and five syllables in length over five experimental runs of 60 trials each. In contrast to the healthy speakers, speakers with hypokinetic dysarthria demonstrated exaggerated sequence length effects for both inter-syllable intervals (ISIs) and speech error rates. Conversely, speakers with ataxic dysarthria failed to demonstrate a sequence length effect on ISIs and were also the only group that did not exhibit practice-related changes in ISIs and speech error rates over the five experimental runs. The exaggerated sequence length effects in the hypokinetic speakers with Parkinson’s disease are consistent with an impairment of action selection during speech sequence production. The absent length effects observed in the speakers with ataxic dysarthria is consistent with previous findings that indicate a limited capacity to buffer speech sequences in advance of their execution. In addition, the lack of practice effects in these speakers suggests that learning-related improvements in the production rate and accuracy of speech sequences involves processing by structures of the cerebellum. Together, the current findings inform models of serial control for speech in healthy speakers and support the notion that sequencing deficits contribute to speech symptoms in speakers with hypokinetic or ataxic dysarthria. In addition, these findings indicate that speech sequencing is differentially impaired in hypokinetic and ataxic dysarthria

Sequence complexity effects on speech production in healthy speakers and speakers with hypokinetic or ataxic dysarthria.

The present study investigated the effects of sequence complexity, defined in terms of phonemic similarity and phonotoactic probability, on the timing and accuracy of serial ordering for speech production in healthy speakers and speakers with either hypokinetic or ataxic dysarthria. Sequences were comprised of strings of consonant-vowel (CV) syllables with each syllable containing the same vowel, /a/, paired with a different consonant. High complexity sequences contained phonemically similar consonants, and sounds and syllables that had low phonotactic probabilities; low complexity sequences contained phonemically dissimilar consonants and high probability sounds and syllables. Sequence complexity effects were evaluated by analyzing speech error rates and within-syllable vowel and pause durations. This analysis revealed that speech error rates were significantly higher and speech duration measures were significantly longer during production of high complexity sequences than during production of low complexity sequences. Although speakers with dysarthria produced longer overall speech durations than healthy speakers, the effects of sequence complexity on error rates and speech durations were comparable across all groups. These findings indicate that the duration and accuracy of processes for selecting items in a speech sequence is influenced by their phonemic similarity and/or phonotactic probability. Moreover, this robust complexity effect is present even in speakers with damage to subcortical circuits involved in serial control for speech