“Training Verb Production in Communicative Context: Evidence From a Person With Chronic Non-fluent Aphasia”, Article Critique Example

“Training verb production in communicative context: Evidence from a person with chronic non-fluent aphasia” by Mira Goral (Lehman College of the City University of New York, NY, USA) and Daniel Kempler (Emerson College, Boston, MA, USA) discusses another kind of speech impediment and is particularly focused on the problem of aphasia treatment. It is well known that aphasia implies a lost ability to comprehend and communicate speech, and is a result of brain damage. The authors’ research is based on the results of the use of constraint-induced treatment in aphasia therapy. The study is aimed at researching a treatment conducted with an individual suffering from chronic non-fluent aphasia and designed to improve verb production in sentence and narrative contexts. The authors also focus on “how features of this particular treatment protocol might have influenced the outcome of the study and how they might enhance CIAT protocols more generally”.

A 60-year-old male who suffered a left cerebrovascular accident 12 years before the present investigation was chosen to be a study participant. The results of the study were thoroughly evaluated. They demonstrated that the number of verbs narrative generation following treatment increased greatly. Moreover, the authors state that “a positive change was perceived by naive listeners who rated the social-communicative impact of the participant’s narratives”. The outcome of the study is considered to be a result of a number of constraints forced on the production of sentence during the treatment process, of the fact that the treatment exchanges have the informative nature, and also of the comparative intensity of the treatment schedule.

The significance of the research is limited firstly by the fact that there was only one individual participating in the research, secondly, the authors didn’t make a direct contrasting and comparing of the treatment protocols, and finally, the participant has been attending both individual and group therapy for the past 5 years, which makes it difficult to distinguish the improvements resulted directly from treatment and those resulted from the therapies the participant has been in recently.