Treatment for spoken and written word retrieval in the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia

ABSTRACT

This study investigated whether a treatment programme for spoken word retrieval, supplemented with written naming, was beneficial for an individual with right-hemisphere dominant semantic variant of PPA (svPPA). Assessment and treatment were delivered remotely through Skype. Treatment consisted of two phases of lexical retrieval therapy (Repetition and Reading in the Presence of a Picture: RRIPP), with and without written responses (Phases 1 and 2 respectively), and a third treatment phase based on the procedures of Conceptual Enrichment (COEN) therapy. The first two phases of treatment resulted in short-lasting improvements in spoken and written word retrieval, with greater improvement in Phase 2 when written production was also required. Both treatment phases resulted in gains only for treated items, but generalised to different depictions to those treated. However, Phase 2 also resulted in significant improvement of treated items on a comprehension task. COEN treatment did not result in significant gains in word retrieval or comprehension. This study reinforces the value of a simple lexical retrieval treatment delivered remotely. It adds to the current evidence that anomia in svPPA can be responsive to treatment, but also shows that challenges remain regarding maintenance effects and the generalisation of treatment effects to connected speech.

KEYWORDS:

• Semantic variant PPA (svPPA)
• Semantic dementia
• Treatment
• Lexical retrieval
• COEN
• Telemedicine

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Lyndsey Nickels http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0311-3524

Notes

1 Baseline measures on these tasks are reported for the replication in Suárez-González et al. (2018), with the participant at floor.

2 The sets were also approximately matched for frequency from the CELEX database (Baayen, Piepenbrock, & van Rijn, 1995). However standard database frequency values did not seem to be the appropriate measure of frequency for personally chosen items: e.g., some of the words from the horse riding category (e.g., girth or reins) are relatively low frequency, however in DSN’s work these words were used on a daily basis. Items could not be matched for regularity of spelling, however, the regular (e.g., cat) and irregular/inconsistently spelled items (e.g., leopard) were divided approximately equally between the sets, although most items were (partly) irregular in spelling. Comparing the regularity values from N-Watch (Davis, 2005) there was no significant difference in mean regularity of items across sets (two sample t-tests, p’s > .30).

3 Furthermore, for this phase the post-test occurred on the day of the last practice session, rather than a day later.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Cross Program Support Grant from the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, and by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship [grant number FT120100102].