Aphasia

BACKGROUND: Very early aphasia rehabilitation studies have shown mixed results. Differences in therapy intensity and therapy type contribute significantly to the equivocal results. AIMS: To compare a standardized, prescribed very early aphasia therapy regimen with a historical usual care control group at therapy completion (4-5 weeks post-stroke) and again at follow-up (6 months). METHODS & PROCEDURES: This study compared two cohorts from successive studies conducted in four Australian acute/sub-acute hospitals...

The current study explored the clinical feasibility and costs of embedding three different intensive service delivery models for aphasia treatment (computer, group therapy, and therapy with a speech pathology therapy assistant) within three sub-acute facilities. The study employed a two cohort comparison design, with the first cohort (n = 22) receiving the standard service of treatment currently offered. This treatment was delivered by a speech-language pathologist and involved on average 3 hours of treatment/week over 8 weeks...

Current research on bilingual aphasia highlights the paucity in recommendations for optimal rehabilitation for bilingual aphasic patients (Roberts & Kiran, 2007; Edmonds & Kiran, 2006). In this paper, we have developed a computational model to simulate an English-Spanish bilingual language system in which language representations can vary by age of acquisition (AoA) and relative proficiency in the two languages to model individual participants. This model is subsequently lesioned by varying connection strengths between the semantic and phonological networks and retrained based on individual patient demographic information to evaluate whether or not the model's prediction of rehabilitation matched the actual treatment outcome...

BACKGROUND: PREVIOUS RESEARCH HAS HIGHLIGHTED PSYCHOLINGUISTIC VARIABLES INFLUENCING NAMING ABILITY FOR INDIVIDUALS WITH APHASIA, INCLUDING: familiarity, frequency, age of acquisition, imageability, operativity, and length (Nickels & Howard, 1995) and a potential link between typicality and generalisation to untreated items in intervention (Kiran, Sandberg, & Sebastian, 2011). However, the effect of concept typicality (the extent to which an item can be considered a prototype of a category) on naming in aphasia warrants further examination...