Background: Capturing evidence of the effects of therapy within everyday communication is the holy grail of aphasia treatment design and evaluation. Whilst impaired sentence production is a predominant symptom of Broca's-type aphasia, the effects of sentence production therapy on everyday conversation have not been investigated. Given the…

Background: Therapeutic alliance refers to the interactional and relational processes operating during therapeutic interventions. It has been shown to be a strong determinant of treatment efficacy in psychotherapy, and evidence is emerging from a range of healthcare and medical disciplines to suggest that the construct of therapeutic alliance may…

Background: There is conflicting evidence regarding the benefits of intensive speech and language therapy (SLT), particularly because intensity is often confounded with total SLT provided. Aims: A two-centre, randomized, rater-blinded, parallel study was conducted to compare the efficacy of 100 h of SLT in a regular (RT) versus intensive (IT)…

Resolving the inability to produce a word through a gestural realization is often a compensatory strategy used with aphasic patients. However, context and interpersonal knowledge between participants are also essential factors for finding or guessing the right word or the right gesture. In the "Interactions between Aphasic people &…

Goal: The goal of this study was to measure the percentage of patients who exhibited communication disorders in the Speech and Hearing Clinic (HSC) at the University of Jordan (UJ); percentages were examined by patient age and gender. Method: The profiles of 1,140 patients who presented with communication disorders were studied. Patients attended…

Purpose: The authors designed this investigation to extend the development of a treatment for acquired apraxia of speech (AOS)--sound production treatment (SPT)--by examining the effects of 2 treatment intensities and 2 schedules of practice. Method: The authors used a multiple baseline design across participants and behaviors with 4 speakers with…

Our goal was to characterize the effects of intensive aphasia therapy on the N400, an electrophysiological index of lexical-semantic processing. Immediately before and after 4 weeks of intensive speech-language therapy, people with aphasia performed a task in which they had to determine whether spoken words were a "match" or a "mismatch" to…

This post hoc study investigated coverbal gesture patterns in two persons with chronic Wernicke's aphasia. They had both received therapy focusing on multimodal communication therapy, and their pre- and post-therapy verbal and gestural skills in face-to-face conversational interaction with their speech therapist were analysed by administering a…

Background: Previous studies of therapy for acquired anomia have treated nouns in isolation. The effect on nouns in connected speech remains unclear. In a recent study in 2012, we used a novel noun syntax therapy and found an increase in the number of determiner plus noun constructions in narrative after therapy. Aims: Two aims arose from the…

Background: An evidence-practice gap has been identified in current acute aphasia management practice, with the provision of services to people with aphasia in the acute hospital widely considered in the literature to be inconsistent with best-practice recommendations. The reasons for this evidence-practice gap are unclear; however, speech…

Objective: Positive results have been reported with melodic intonation therapy (MIT) in nonfluent aphasia patients with damage to their left-brain speech processes, using the patient's intact ability to sing to promote functional language. This pilot study sought to determine the immediate effects of introducing modified melodic intonation therapy…

Background & Aims: A recent systematic review of conversation training for communication partners of people with aphasia has shown that it is effective, and improves participation in conversation for people with chronic aphasia. Other research suggests that people with aphasia are better able to learn communication strategies in an environment…

Background: Although aphasia rehabilitation should include significant others, it is currently unknown how this recommendation is adopted in speech-language therapy practice. Speech-language therapists' (SLTs) experience of including significant others in aphasia rehabilitation is also understudied, yet a better understanding of clinical…

Background: The number of reliable and valid instruments to measure the effects of therapy in apraxia of speech (AoS) is limited. Aims: To evaluate the newly developed Modified Diadochokinesis Test (MDT), which is a task to assess the effects of rate and rhythm therapies for AoS in a multiple baseline across behaviours design. Methods: The…

The aim of the study was to compare approaches highlighting either semantic or phonological features to treat naming deficits in aphasia. Treatment focused on improving picture naming. An alternating treatments design was used with a multiple baseline design across stimuli to examine effects of both approaches in two participants with varying…