One goal of the Healthy People 2010 program is to reduce health disparities across different segments of the population. Diagnosis and treatment of sentence comprehension deficits in patients with aphasia is one area where disparities continue to exist even though this topic is of great theoretical importance. The current research on this topic, however, lacks specific recommendations on how to train sentence comprehension skills in patients with aphasia and to what extent generalization of comprehension skills occurs across sentences of similar syntactic structure and across different comprehension tasks. The goal of the project is to develop an effective, theoretically sound, treatment for sentence comprehension deficits in patients with aphasia following stroke. Our approach to developing effective therapies for these deficits will be guided by results in linguistics, psycholinguistics, and aphasiology. This project consists of two distinct phases: Phase 1: Specific Plans and Milestones for R21 (Year 1) In the first (R21) phase of the project, which will last one year, we will develop two effective therapies for syntactic comprehension deficits - one based on picture matching and one based on object enactment. Milestones will be measures of the effectiveness of these therapies. In this year, we will also develop the optimal treatment prescription (frequency and duration of therapy sessions) and the stimuli to be utilized for training and generalization. Phase 2: R33 (Years 2-5) in the second (R33) phase of the project, we will investigate the wider clinical utility of the treatment developed in Phase 1. We will address the critical issues of rate of acquisition of treated items, generalization to untrained items, maintenance of performance after termination of treatment, transfer to everyday comprehension tasks, and optimal patient selection for training. The expected outcome of this phase is a novel treatment approach whose clinical utility is well characterized and that can be used by clinicians with appropriate patients with aphasia.

Public Health Relevance

This project is relevant because it will address the important issue of language recovery following a theoretically based sentence comprehension treatment for patients with aphasia. The ability to understand sentences is often affected in aphasia and impairs comprehension of sentences in which syntax determines aspects of meaning such as thematic roles. We will first develop two new methods of treatment and, in the second phase of the research, determine how successfully training one structure generalizes to others, how it leads to savings in further treatments, how it affects passage comprehension, and how long it lasts. The result is expected to be an effective and efficient training protocol that can be used to treat deficits in syntactically based comprehension people with aphasia.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)
Type
Exploratory/Developmental Grants Phase II (R33)
Project #
5R33DC010461-05
Application #
8517639
Study Section
Special Emphasis Panel (NSS)
Program Officer
Cooper, Judith
Project Start
2009-09-20
Project End
2014-08-31
Budget Start
2013-09-01
Budget End
2014-08-31
Support Year
5
Fiscal Year
2013
Total Cost
$576,853
Indirect Cost
$170,273
Name
Boston University
Department
Other Health Professions
Type
Schools of Allied Health Profes
DUNS #
049435266
City
Boston
State
MA
Country
United States
Zip Code
02215
Meier, Erin L; Johnson, Jeffrey P; Villard, Sarah et al. (2017) Does Naming Therapy Make Ordering in a Restaurant Easier? Dynamics of Co-Occurring Change in Cognitive-Linguistic and Functional Communication Skills in Aphasia. Am J Speech Lang Pathol 26:266-280
Des Roches, Carrie A; Vallila-Rohter, Sofia; Villard, Sarah et al. (2016) Evaluating Treatment and Generalization Patterns of Two Theoretically Motivated Sentence Comprehension Therapies. Am J Speech Lang Pathol 25:S743-S757
Meier, Erin L; Lo, Melody; Kiran, Swathi (2016) Understanding semantic and phonological processing deficits in adults with aphasia: Effects of category and typicality. Aphasiology 30:719-749
Kiran, Swathi; Des Roches, Carrie; Villard, Sarah et al. (2015) The effect of a sentence comprehension treatment on discourse comprehension in aphasia. Aphasiology 29:1289-1311
Vallila-Rohter, Sofia; Kiran, Swathi (2015) An Examination of Strategy Implementation During Abstract Nonlinguistic Category Learning in Aphasia. J Speech Lang Hear Res 58:1195-209
Levy, Joshua; Hoover, Elizabeth; Waters, Gloria et al. (2012) Effects of syntactic complexity, semantic reversibility, and explicitness on discourse comprehension in persons with aphasia and in healthy controls. Am J Speech Lang Pathol 21:S154-65
Kiran, Swathi; Caplan, David; Sandberg, Chaleece et al. (2012) Development of a theoretically based treatment for sentence comprehension deficits in individuals with aphasia. Am J Speech Lang Pathol 21:S88-S102