Training Verb Production in Communicative Context: Evidence From a Person With Chronic Non-fluent Aphasia, Article Review 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. In particular the authors are concerned about the effectiveness of a narrowly defined constraint-induced aphasia treatment (CIAT) and the social-communicative validity of the measured advances in communication abilities following treatment, considering as well the fact that the treatment is intensely scheduled, verb output form is constrained and informative interactions are involved.  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”. They as well claim that the process of collecting and developing initial data on the subject, putting into practice a new measure of the social-communicative factor’s influence on language improvement, was initiated by acknowledging the importance of asserting that any language improvement found in post-treatment measures has a beneficial effect outside the clinic.

A 60-year-old male who suffered a left cerebrovascular accident 12 years before the present investigation was chosen to be a study participant. Having little-to-no speech output for years after the accident, he was gradually recovering his language communication functions with the help of individual and group therapy. He perfectly fitted the experiment, reporting to have continual frustration due to his difficulties in communicating and being strongly inspired to overcome his problem and improve his communication abilities. The experiment implied the administration of a constraint-induced aphasia treatment adapted for a single participant. The treatment was designed to focus on the communication of verbs within informative exchanges. The investigation was being conducted while the participant was involved in attending weakly two unrelated conversation groups, where he was to discuss various topics with the use of multi-modal communication without focusing on structured language treatment activities. In the article the authors provide the number of principles that they claim to be guided by and that they choose to adhere to when performing experimental language intervention, which are: to be relatively intense; to constrain the target output; to use informative exchanges; to focus on materials relevant to the participant; to allow shaping of the task demands to match the participant’s improving production abilities.

The results of the study were thoroughly assessed, verb production in narratives being evaluated both before and after the treatment.  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. In the article the authors inform on analyses and results of the standardized measures, verb and noun production in the narratives and social-communicative ratings.

The findings that the authors present demonstrate how CIAT can be looked at from the different angle, discovering various factors of beneficial influence it may have on the daily life of an individual suffering from aphasia.  According to the authors, what is really important about aphasia rehabilitation is not language functions development or individual’s improving his or her linguistic structures production, but a positive influence it has on personality’s social interactions with other individuals, the way it helps to communicate on daily basis by improving personality’s communication abilities. In their investigation the authors evaluated the extent to which potential conversational partners reacted and responded to the changes in individual’s communicative skills, comparing those before the treatment to those after the treatment. They discovered that the participant was actually perceived as a better communicator and a more competent communication partner after the treatment was provided. The authors conclude that “the results highlight the potential contribution of social-validation measures and add to the literature one such tool and preliminary data suggesting that CIAT can bring about perceptible, measurable, and relevant improvements in communication ability”.

The authors mention several warning concerning the consistency of their study results. First of all, the reliability of the research is limited 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. 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. The increases in participant’s performance may be attributed not only to the treatment itself, but as well to practice outcomes of producing the same narratives on five different circumstances for as long as one month, since the same three topics were brought out at each point. Yet still it’s believed that the positive changes in participant’s language functions were treatment related, and there is little doubt about the effectiveness of CIAT. Anyway, “additional cases will be needed to further test the potential applications and effects of this treatment approach”, the authors maintain.