The efficacy of treatments for sentence production deficits in aphasia: a systematic review

ABSTRACT

Background: Many individuals with aphasia (IWA) experience sentence production deficits (SPD), which can affect their daily interactions. Even if distinct treatments have been developed to improve these deficits, their efficacy is not always thoroughly measured, which makes it difficult to determine the optimal treatment for a given IWA. Objective: The primary objective of this study is to analyse the efficacy of the treatments that have been proposed for SPD in terms of gains on trained items, generalization to untreated items, maintenance of the acquired gains, and transfer to other contexts. Methods: A systematic review was conducted across the following databases: PubMed, CINHAL, and LLBA. Results: Twenty-five studies met criteria for this review, regrouping 11 different SPD treatments and 84 IWA. Different types of treatment were found. They mainly target verbs, sentence structures, or morphology. Concerning efficacy, gains on trained items and generalization to untreated items were demonstrated for almost every treatment, whereas the other efficacy measures were not always reported or improved. IWA characteristics and intensity treatment variables were also analysed for each treatment. Conclusions: No matter whether they focus on verbs, sentence structures, or morphology, most of the analysed treatments seem to be effective for improving SPD in IWA. Through various treatments, efficacy seems to be dependent on IWA’s characteristics such as time post-stroke and aphasia severity.

KEYWORDS:

• Aphasia
• sentence production
• agrammatism
• treatment
• stroke

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This review is an independent research from a Master’s Research Fellowship to SEP supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Santé (FRQS). The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the FRQS; Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Santé;