The goal of our work is to develop an accessible, effective and cost effective speech and language treatment for aphasia. To achieve this goal, we will develop a commercial prototype of a computer program called Sentactics based on over 15 years of research at Northwestern University that demonstrates the effectiveness of the program to improve speech production and comprehension skills of individuals with aphasia. Preliminary work funded by the NIH resulted in an initial version of the Sentactics program. A clinical trial revealed that individuals with agrammatic aphasia who used Sentactics improved their speech and language production and comprehension skills significantly, with gains equivalent to subjects who were administered the clinical treatment from expert human clinicians. This study also demonstrated that individuals with aphasia find the Sentactics program to be highly engaging and fun to use. Our project aims to demonstrate the feasibility of a commercial prototype of an improved version of Sentactics that incorporates two new features: (a) a spoken language system that uses speech and natural language processing technologies to provide feedback to clients about the accuracy of their speech productions, and (b) a clinician oversight capability that enables individual clinicians to use the internet to monitor multiple simultaneous users of the program and communicate with individual users as needed. In Phase I of the project, we will demonstrate the feasibility of using the spoken language system to provide feedback to clients about the accuracy of their speech productions. In Phase II we will develop a commercial prototype of the program incorporating the spoken language system and clinician oversight functions. We will then field test the program with individuals with aphasia. We will compare changes in the speech production and comprehension abilities of individuals using the Sentactics program to individuals using a commercially available program.
Successful outcomes of this project would result in a commercial prototype of an accessible, affordable, effective and easy to use speech and language therapy program for use by individuals with aphasia in clinics or homes. This project addresses a great national need for inexpensive, intensive, extensive, effective treatments for millions of individuals with aphasia. ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
