Interfered-Naming Therapy for Aphasia (INTA): behavioural and computational effects of a novel linguistic-executive approach

ABSTRACT

Background and aims

Executive functions recently have gained attention as important contributors to language performance in aphasia. Picture/word interference embraces both executive control and lexical processing through distracted confrontation naming. Thus, we created a novel approach that embedded interfered-naming into an established lexical therapy framework. We aimed to (1) investigate patients’ behavioural response to distractor types and treatment methods of interfered-naming and (2) determine specific therapy effects on linguistic versus executive processing and initial eligibility criteria.

Methods

Persons with word-finding difficulties in chronic aphasia received 4-week therapy in a block design with thorough pre-post-testing including computational modelling. During therapy, picture naming was distracted by auditory stimuli, which were primed by a preceding comprehension task and directly assisted by increasing semantic or phonological cues.

Results

Nineteen participants were included in the diagnostic study, 12 of which also completed the therapy study. Distractor types did not generally yield differential effects at baseline. The novel linguistic-executive treatment significantly improved pure naming in most (9 out of 12) cases, fostered generalisation to untrained items, increased semantic weights in the computational model, and reduced automated speech. Therapy gains correlated positively with initial distractor comprehension, lexical-semantics, and word discrimination and negatively with automated speech and conceptual-semantics.

Conclusion

The interference paradigm combined with computational modelling offers a useful tool for aphasia diagnosis, and the new treatment approach revealed to be effective. Semantic and executive processing appear to be the core source of improvements.

KEYWORDS:

• Aphasia
• treatment
• computational modelling
• automatisms
• interference

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG, Own Position). We thank student assistants Inga Hameister, Veronika Loescher, Elisabeth Meyer, and Stephanie Koehler for deliverance of speech therapy and routine assistance, and all participants for their participation. We also thank the reviewers for their thoughtful and helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [AB 282/2-1].