Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 1998. / "A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, April 30, 1998." Also available in print.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of progressive relaxation training on the verbal ability of adult aphasics. Sixteen adult aphasics (15 males and 1 female) were administered a battery of four, 16 item verbal tests (VTB) following a period of relaxation training and a control period. The tasks of the VTB paralleled the four verbal subtests of the PICA (Porch, 1967). Subjects were required to give the function of 15 common objects, to name each object, to produce the name of each object after hearing a carrier phrase and to repeat the name of each object. Relaxation procedures employed a modified Jacobson (1929) technique.

No description available.

Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Alberta, 2010. / A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Speech Language Pathology, Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology. Title from pdf file main screen (viewed on January 24, 2010). Includes bibliographical references.

alterações que a afasia acarreta na escrita do sujeito acometido por esta patologia, além de proporcionar uma nova abordagem no processo terapêutico do afásico. Para tanto, participaram desta pesquisa 04 sujeitos portadores de afasia que fazem parte da Oficina de Escrita do Grupo de Convivência da Universidade Católica de Pernambuco (UNICAP), a qual tem como finalidade abordar e trabalhar os aspectos relacionados à linguagem escrita. A análise dos dados foi qualitativa, uma vez que este estudo se propôs a observar a produção textual do afásico diante de diferentes gêneros textuais, e assim identificar qual o gênero textual mais recorrente e produzido com maior facilidade pelo portador de afasia. Após a análise dos dados coletados, foi possível observar que os afásicos apresentaram facilidade em produzir gêneros textuais ligados a situações concretas, em contraposição à produção dos gêneros que necessitaram realizar uma relação com situações abstratas. Deste modo, é importante que os fonoaudiólogos admitam uma postura funcional ao invés da organicista, possibilitando o distanciamento dos testes que focalizam usos descontextualizados da linguagem, os quais excluem os aspectos subjetivos e heterogêneos da linguagem. Portanto, a (re)habilitação da afasia deve permitir que os afásicos utilizem práticas de escrita que só os gêneros escritos podem proporcionar, uma vez que esta postura mostra-se como um caminho frutífero para o trabalho terapêutico fonoaudiológico

The purpose of this investigation was to describe the attitudes of individuals who were spouses of patients with aphasia. Using modified Q-methodology, 15 spouses of fluent aphasic patients, 15 spouses of nonfluent aphasic patients and 30 matched controls completed a 70-item Q-sort constructed specifically for this study. The spouses of nonfluent aphasic patients were found to have a greater number of negative attitudes toward their spouses than were the spouses of fluent aphasic patients. The spouses of patients in both aphasia groups were found to have a greater number of negative attitudes toward their spouses than the matched controls. In addition, six factors (Compliance, Desirability, Egocentricity, Independence, Maturity, and Sociability) representative of the spouse-patient relationship were identified that incorporated the most commonly held attitudes by the spouses of patients in both aphasia groups.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of a newly adapted treatment, Attentive Reading with Constrained Summarization-Written, to improve microlinguistic and macrolinguistic aspects of written and spoken discourse of people with mild aphasia. Background: Attentive Reading with Constrained Summarization-Written takes a top-down approach to language rehabilitation that focuses on the cognitive-linguistic processes required for spoken and written discourse production. Methods: Five people with mild aphasia received Attentive Reading with Constrained Summarization-Written across two single subject experimentally controlled pre-post treatment design studies. Results: All participants demonstrated improvement in both written and spoken discourse generalization measures. Improvement in functional communication, and confrontation naming was also observed for some participants. Conclusions: The results reported in these two studies provide preliminary evidence that Attentive Reading with Constrained Summarization-Written is a viable treatment option to improve both written and spoken discourse in people with mild aphasia. Participants demonstrated different pre-treatment profiles and mechanisms of improvement, which are discussed.

For many years, treatment for word retrieval deficits has involved the use of various cueing techniques to help trigger retrieval of target words. Research has shown that accuracy for future retrieval of target words is best achieved by training subjects with semantically based cues. Personalized cues that are created by the subjects themselves to help remember a target word have been shown to be the most effective of the semantically based cues. However, even with the use of personalized cues, accuracy for naming tasks has been found to decrease once training is completed. Current research in memory indicates that, for normal subjects, techniques that facilitate future recall of information include testing, additional study, overlearning, and distributed practice. This research examined the influence of posttraining maintenance sessions on the long term memory of subjects with aphasia. The goal was to compare the effect on naming accuracy for stimuli (a) presented in two additional training sessions (b) presented in one additional session, (c) not presented in any additional sessions. Additional sessions presented opportunities for testing, study, overlearning, and distributed practice for selected stimuli. Three adult male subjects with moderate aphasia created their own cues to help remember 30 pictures of famous characters. During training sessions, these cues were presented to trigger name recall. Following the end of the 3-week training period, the 30 pictures were divided into groups of 10 cards called, A, B, and C. There were two additional training sessions for A, one for B, and none for C. A probe following the last session showed that for two of the subjects, the addition of posttraining maintenance sessions acted to enhance naming accuracy, and two sessions resulted in much higher accuracy than one session. This is consistent with research with normal subjects and suggests that short intermittent training sessions can help maintain naming accuracy with subjects with aphasia.

Problem-solving abilities of individuals with aphasia have received limited attention in their assessment and remediation. At this time, there is substantially more information available on the linguistic performance of persons with aphasia than on their cognitive processing performance. Assessment of problem-solving abilities in this population has typically used tasks with low verbal loadings. However, both linguistic and cognitive competence are required for effective communication and activities of daily life. The purpose of the present study was to determine if mild-to-moderate subjects with aphasia differed in their question-asking strategies as compared with normal subjects. A modification of Mosher and Hornsby's (1966) Twenty Questions task was used. The Twenty Questions task is considered a verbal problem-solving task that requires a cognitive strategy. Subjects were 12 adults with mild-to-moderate aphasia recruited from the out-patient intervention groups at the Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Center and 12 non-brain-injured adult controls from the Portland community. The experimental task required subjects to ask "yes" or "no" questions to identify a target item that the examiner was thinking of in a JO-picture array. Items in the array were selected from common categories of transportation, furniture, tools, animals, foods, and clothing. Subjects were told that the object of the "game" was to use as few questions as possible to guess the item the examiner was thinking of. Subjects were administered the experimental task three times. Aphasic subjects were found to be significantly impaired in their use of question-asking strategies. They needed significantly more questions to identify target items than the normal controls. Their question-asking strategies used significantly fewer and less efficient constraint seeking questions than normal subjects. Some aphasic subjects used no constraint-seeking questions at all, but only hypothesis-scanning questions that targeted only one item. These results are consistent with the question-asking strategies of other brain-injured populations as assessed by the Twenty Questions task. Results suggested that individuals with aphasia may have cognitive difficulties in addition to their specific linguistic impairments.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on November 26, 2007) Vita. Includes bibliographical references.