Effect of Mandarin Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST) in Mandarin-English bilinguals with aphasia: A single-case experimental design

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to improve verb retrieval ability in Mandarin-English bilinguals with aphasia by adapting the Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST) into Mandarin Chinese. Two Mandarin-English bilingual patients with chronic post-stroke aphasia participated in this study via online conferencing system following a multiple-baseline design. Both of them completed a 10-week of Mandarin VNeST treatment, and were probed on verb retrieval ability in a sentence context in both languages. Response accuracy was analysed to investigate the treatment acquisition, within-language generalization, and cross-language generalization effects. Standardized language assessments in both languages were administered pre- and post-treatment to further examine generalization to other linguistic tasks. Error analysis was conducted to investigate the evolution of within- and cross-language errors. Both patients improved after training in Mandarin VNeST, and showed different patterns of within-language and cross-language generalizations. They also improved in a variety of standardized language tasks. Error analysis showed a decline in semantic errors over the course of treatment in both patients, with cross-linguistic errors showing a decrease during Mandarin probes and an increase during English probes in one of the patients. This study contributes to our current understanding of theories of bilingual verb processing, and provides treatment guidance in Mandarin-English bilinguals with aphasia.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual aphasia
• Verb retrieval
• VNeST
• Mandarin-English
• Cross-language generalization

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Acknowledgments

First and foremost, the authors thank the individuals who participated in this study. We also thank the members of the Aphasia Research Laboratory for their support throughout the development and execution of this study. Special thanks to Maria Varkanitsa for her kind help with drawing the probe stimuli and suggestions on the control task.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Six of the verb stimuli in the VNT (i.e., “wash”, “read”, “watch”, “pinch”, “throw”, “bite”) overlapped with the treatment stimuli (treated and semantically related untreated), but only one verb on the VNT (“read”) improved from pre- to post-treatment assessment.

Additional information

Funding

The first and third authors were funded by the NIH/NIDCD under [grant number 1U01DC014922]. The authors report no conflict of interest. Swathi Kiran is a scientific consultant for The Learning Corporation (FKA Constant Therapy) but there is no scientific overlap with the work in this project; National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.