Center for the Study of Aphasia Recovery (C-STAR): Telerehabilitation for Aphasia (TERRA)
University of South Carolina
Summary
Speech-language therapy is generally found to be helpful in the rehabilitation of aphasia. However, not all patients with aphasia have access to adequate treatment to maximize their recovery. The goal of this project is to compare the efficacy of telerehabilitation or Aphasia Remote Therapy (ART) to the more traditional In-Clinic Therapy (I-CT).
Description
Stroke is the leading cause of adult disability in the United States. One of the most debilitating impairments resulting from stroke is aphasia, a language disorder caused by damage to the left hemisphere of the brain. While evidence shows that aphasia therapy improves speech production and communicative quality of life in persons with chronic (\>6 months) stroke-induced aphasia, the amount of therapy provided to patients in the United States is typically far less than what is probably necessary to maximize recovery. There are a few important reasons underlying this discrepancy. For example, c…
Eligibility
- Age range
- 21–80 years
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- No
Inclusion Criteria: 1. Participants must have sustained a left hemisphere ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke at least 12 months prior to enrollment. 2. Participants must primarily speak English for at least the past 20 years. 3. Participants must be capable of giving informed consent or indicating another to provide informed consent. 4. Participants must be between 21-80 years of age. 5. Participants must be magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) compatible (e.g., no metal implants, not claustrophobic) on a 3-Tesla (3T) scanner. Exclusion Criteria: 1. Participants must not have previous neurological…
Interventions
- BehavioralSemantically-focused therapy tasks
1\) Semantic feature analysis (SFA; Boyle \& Coelho, 1995; Boyle, 2004). For each pictured stimulus the participant is prompted to name the picture. Then, s/he is encouraged to produce semantically related words that represent features similar to the target word. 2) Semantic barrier task. This approach includes features of the Promoting Aphasics' Communication Effectiveness (PACE; Davis \& Wilcox,1985). The goal of the task is for one participant (e.g., person with aphasia) to describe each card so that the other participant (e.g., clinician) can guess the picture on the card. 3) Verb network strengthening therapy (VNeST; Edmonds et al., 2009; 2014) targets lexical retrieval of verbs and their thematic nouns. The objective of VNeST is for the participant to generate verb-noun associates with the purpose of strengthening the connections between the verb and its thematic roles.
- BehavioralPhonologically-focused therapy tasks
1\) Phonological components analysis task (PCA; Leonard et al., 2008). The participant first attempts to name a given picture and then to identify the phonological features of the target words. 2) Phonological production task focuses on the identification of phonological features of targeted, imageable nouns and verbs. It requires the participant to sort picture stimuli based on the number of syllables and then to identify a hierarchy of phonological features. Once each targeted feature is identified for the pair of words, the participant is required to blend the syllables/sounds together. 3) Phonological judgment task relies on computerized presentation of verbs and nouns where participants are required to judge whether pairs of words include similar phonological features (e.g. # of syllables, initial phonemes, final phonemes, rhyming).
Location
- University of South Carolina Aphasia LabColumbia, South Carolina