The Right Hemisphere's Role in Recovery from Aphasia: Evidence from Intracarotid Sodium Amytal Testing

TB

Script training and its application to everyday life observed in an aphasia center

Script training focuses on improved production of personally relevant monologues and dialogues through intensive practice. Commonly reported components of script training include use of personally relevant or functional scripts, a structured cueing hierarchy, and intensive rehearsal of scripted lines to promote automaticity (Youmans, Holland, Munoz, & Bourgeois, 2005; Lee, Kaye, & Cherney, 2009; Youmans, Youmans, & Hancock, 2011; Goldberg, Haley, & Jacks, 2012; Fridriksson et al., 2012). Fridriksson et al. (2012) also trained a series of common scripts to study neurophysiological changes that result from such training. This proposal presents results from four persons with aphasia (PWA) who received script training in an aphasia center, where there is opportunity to observe the effect of that training on everyday life. A secondary goal is to examine what, if any, individual, intervention, or environmental factors might affect a PWA’s ability to benefit from such training

AphasiaBank: Preliminary Lexical, Morphosyntactic, and Error Analyses

AphasiaBank collects and analyzes samples of the discourse of individuals with aphasia and normal participants across a range of tasks. The goal of AphasiaBank is to assemble a large repository of video-recorded discourse samples, transcribed in a format that facilitates extensive computerized language analyses. This paper outlines the AphasiaBank protocol and presents core analyses of language samples from 15 normal adults and 15 individuals with aphasia using selected analyses for lexicon, morphosyntax, errors, and repetition

Classification of aphasia: WAB type versus clinical impression

TB

A Model Treatment Approach for the Acutely Aphasic Patient

TB

AphasiaBank: 7-Year Interest Rate Index and Yield

At the 2008 Clinical Aphasiology Conference, Holland et al. (2008) presented a general introduction to the AphasiaBank project that had recently been funded by NIH. That report covered: AphasiaBank’s goals, rationale, and discourse samples; the demographic and test data being collected; and brief descriptions of the coding and analysis systems that had been modified from the very well established Child Language Data Exchange (CHILDES, MacWhinney, 2000) for use with persons with aphasia (PWA). The goal was both to explain the project to the CAC audience and to encourage their participation as researchers and educators. Now entering its 8th year of funding, the database has grown to contain 302 transcribed discourse samples from PWA and 161 transcribed discourse samples from non-aphasic comparison participants. AphasiaBank is currently the largest shared database of multi-media interactions for the study of communication in aphasia. The standardized protocol guarantees maximal comparability across the database. Some participants have been retested a second and third time at intervals of a year or more. Transcriptions of the discourse samples are linked to digitized audio/video, all of which are password protected at the website and can be downloaded by AphasiaBank members. Additionally, other data sets at the website include media files of the Famous People Protocol (Holland, Fromm, Forbes & MacWhinney 2013), transcripts and media for several aphasia script treatment protocols, media for aphasia group treatment sessions, a variety of non-standardized transcripts linked to media contributed by other aphasia researchers, plus media and transcripts from aphasia participants whose native language is French, Spanish, Greek, and Mandarin. The purpose of this paper is to present an updated summary of the following: 1) current demographic and test data on PWA who have completed the standardized protocol; 2) professional membership in the database; 3) published clinical research using the database; and 4) educational applications of the database. In addition, performance on the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB, Kertesz, revised, 2007) by the AphasiaBank sample will be compared with that of the norming sample published for the WAB. The larger AphasiaBank WAB data set comprises a different participant pool in that it represents people with chronic aphasia who seek continued support services

EVAL: A computerized language analysis program for clinicians

Clinicians generally have limited time to evaluate their aphasic clients, and thus are often unable to include discourse-level language in their assessments. Sampling and analyzing language at the discourse level by hand can be very time-consuming, but since it is the level at which day-to-day communication occurs, it provides important information about language use and competence in context. It can also point the way to functional goals for therapy. In this presentation we will illustrate the use of EVAL, a recent addition to the wide array of CLAN computerized language analysis programs freely available from TalkBank (MacWhinney, 2000). EVAL is designed for quick and simple use by clinicians. It measures 25 language characteristics in a transcription of discourse and displays them in an Excel spreadsheet. It can then compare the results with those of a comparison group selected from the AphasiaBank database, or it can compare the results with those of the same participant at earlier or later measurement times (e.g., pre- and post-therapy). It is based on a simplified system of transcription and error coding, designed with the time constraints of busy clinicians in mind. While transcription is done in the CHAT format required for CLAN programs, it can be less detailed