Feasibility of an abstract verb naming treatment for aphasia

ABSTRACT

Purpose

Verb production impairments in aphasia have important implications for sentence production and communication in general. Verbs with low concreteness may be especially important for certain functional uses, and yet limited data regarding their response to treatment are available. This study was designed to examine a novel behavioral treatment approach to improve low concreteness verb naming in persons with aphasia.

Method

Three persons with nonfluent aphasia participated in a single-subject experimental design research study examining the feasibility of the novel treatment. The treatment was based on approaches that target the verb as the central node of meaning during sentence construction. The primary outcome measure was a sentence completion probe. Effects on untreated stimuli and on general language and naming assessments were also examined.

Results

Results indicated some limited changes associated with the treatment for two of the participants. Treatment performance data suggested possible improvements in verb processing that were not reflected in the primary outcome measure. Modest decreases in aphasia severity were noted for two of the participants.

Conclusions

The findings provide further support for targeting verbal production of verbs with low concreteness in aphasia. Several lessons learned may benefit future researchers examining areas related to the topic.

KEYWORDS:

• Aphasia
• treatment
• abstract
• concreteness
• verbs

Acknowledgement

Special thanks to Lisa Johnson and Heather Bailey for their assistance with this project. Portions of this research were presented at the 2017 Clinical Aphasiology Conference in Park City, UT. This research represents part of the first author’s dissertation work.

Disclosure statement

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

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02687038.2023.2279180

Notes

¹The sentence frame has a slot for the agent (a person), the target verb, and the object (a person or thing)

²These are functional clinician-selected corpus-informed collocates, as well as items from the client-informed list prepared before treatment. Vary these between sessions as much as is reasonable, depending on the verb’s possibilities and the patient’s preferences.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by SPiRE Award RX-RX001356-01 and VA RR&D Research Career Scientist Award IK6RX002706, both awarded to Julie Wambaugh.