Purpose: Response Elaboration Training (RET) is a treatment program for increasing the amount of information contained in the speech of individuals with aphasia. This study employed a sentence production task (SPT) to examine whether RET will (1) generalize to a task not worked on in treatment and (2) affect syntactic performance. Methods and Procedures: Three adults with chronic non-fluent Broca’s aphasia received RET in this prospective, repeated case study. The dependent variable was a SPT requiring the participant to put a verb in a sentence. Changes in the syntactic performance of the participant’s sentence productions were classified across three parameters: (1) syntactic structure, (2) grammatical completeness, and (3) semantic appropriateness. Results: Findings of this study indicate that RET improves the syntactic performance of individuals with chronic Broca’s aphasia and generalizes to a task not worked on in treatment. Participant responses to the SPT showed increased complexity in syntactic structures, improved grammaticality, and improved topic relevancy. In addition, qualitative improvements were seen in 5 randomly selected verbs for each participant. These improvements included increased length of sentences and fewer false starts, interjections, and disfluencies. Finally, improvements on the Western Aphasia Battery and two picture description tasks were evinced for two participants.

Submitted by Maike Costa (maiksebas@gmail.com) on 2016-07-22T11:51:31Z No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivo total.pdf: 1246811 bytes, checksum: 4cada73ad2abaf6671beba97954e7973 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-07-22T11:51:32Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivo total.pdf: 1246811 bytes, checksum: 4cada73ad2abaf6671beba97954e7973 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-06-04 / The coreference processing is a phenomenon that has been studied internationally. In order to contribute to these national studies, we investigated the coreferential processing from the phenomenon of the Charge Repeated Name Penalty and Informational Charge Hypothesis in patients with aphasia. The overall objective is to analyze the processing of coreference in patients with Broca's aphasia, investigating, specifically if pronouns are processed more readily than names repeated in Brazilian Portuguese in subjects with and without the pathology; and if Superordinate Nominal Phrases are processed more quickly than hyponyms. Two experiments were conducted; and the experimental technique used was automonitoring reading in both experimentos, the independent variable is the type of recovery (pronoun and name repeated the in experiment 01, and Hyponym and hyperonym in the experiment 02) and as dependent variables the reading time of resumption and the accuracy rate to end-of-sentence questions. In experiment 01, the results of the control group were in the direction of what has been found in the literature, about to aphasic patients, the results showed insensitivity to the type of recovery, these data are discussed from a possible deficit in lexicon-semantic integration In experiment 02, once again, the control group follows the direction of what has been found in the literature, and the experimental group was observed that there is not a recovery-type preference. At the end of each phrase a question about it was performed. The subjects were able to answer such questions, indicating the establishment of coreference. We understand, from these data that patients with Broca's aphasia can access the lexical information and establish coreference, but need more time to do it. / O processamento da correferência é um fenômeno que vem sendo estudado internacionalmente. Buscando contribuir com essas estudos no âmbito nacional, investigamos o processamento correferencial a partir do fenômeno da Penalidade do Nome Repetido e Hipótese da Carga Informacional em pacientes com afasia. O objetivo geral do trabalho é analisar o processamento da correferência em pacientes com afasia de Broca, investigando, especificamente, se pronomes são processados mais prontamente do que nomes repetidos em português brasileiro tanto em sujeitos sem patologia, quanto em pacientes com afasia de Broca; e se Sintagmas Nominais (SN) superordenados são processados mais rapidamente do que hipônimos. Foram realizados dois experimentos; em ambos a técnica experimental utilizada foi a leitura automonitorada, sendo a variável independente o tipo de retomada (Pronome e Nome repetido no experimento 01, e Hipônimo e Hiperônimo no experimento 02) e como variáveis dependentes o tempo de leitura da retomada e o índice de acerto às perguntas de final de frase. No experimento 01, os resultados do grupo controle foram na direção do que já foi encontrado na literatura, já em relação aos pacientes afásicos, os resultados mostraram insensibilidade ao tipo de retomada, esses dados são discutidos a partir de um possível déficit na integração léxico-semântica. No experimento 02, mais uma vez, o grupo controle segue a direção do que já foi encontrado na literatura, e para o grupo experimental foi observado que não há uma preferência de tipo de retomada. Ao final de cada frase era realizada uma pergunta sobre a mesma. Os sujeitos conseguiram responder tais questões, indicando o estabelecimento da correferência. Entendemos, a partir desses dados que pacientes com afasia de Broca conseguem acessar a informação lexical e estabelecer a correferência, mas que necessitam de um maior tempo para fazê-lo.