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Abstract
Background: Personalised cueing is a treatment method for naming deficits in patients with aphasia. As part of the treatment patients choose their own cues to help recall a target word. These cues usually include personally relevant semantic information, which is hypothesised to enhance long-term naming abilities. Previous research has shown that personalised cueing can improve long-term naming accuracy in persons with aphasia. However, no research has shown that personalised cueing carries over to improved naming in natural settings.
Aims: The study aimed to examine the long-term generalisation of improved word finding using the personalised cueing method.
Methods & Procedures: Three individuals participated in 12 training trials using the personalised cueing method; 40 unnamed stimulus items were chosen for each participant. Pre-training measures of the Sentence Production Task (SPT) and Message Exchange Task (MET) were administered for each participant. Of the 40 stimulus items, 20 were then trained using the personalised cueing method across 12 training sessions. Post-training measures of the SPT and MET were then collected, along with measures on a Caregiver Partner Rating scale to assess naming accuracy in natural settings. The 20 untrained stimulus items were also probed to assess generalisation to untrained stimuli.
Outcomes & Results: Two of the three participants showed improvement in naming trained items in natural settings, but little improvement was noted on the untrained stimulus items. Results for these patients were consistent with other studies on the personalised cueing method. The third participant demonstrated a slight increase in naming accuracy over time. Shortly after this study that participant was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.
Conclusions: Results suggest that personalised cueing is an effective method of improving naming in certain individuals with aphasia. It also suggests that the effects of personalised cueing are maintained over time and are evident in natural settings.
Notes
Some readers may wonder why Bob Marshall would be a co-author on an article in a special issue of Aphasiology in his honour. Well, he is the creator of personalised cueing as a treatment for aphasia, and he contributed many key ideas to this study, most of which were taken directly from a grant he wrote several years ago. So, while he contributed significantly to this paper, he had no idea it was going to appear in this special issue. All the papers in this special edition of Aphasiology are a wonderful opportunity to recognise Bob's profound and wide-ranging contributions to clinical aphasiology. He has been a friend, mentor, colleague, teacher, and irascible critic for decades. And of all the things Bob has done in his career, the most important is this: he has been an effective, sensitive, and encouraging clinician for literally hundreds of patients with aphasia.