Stimulating sentence production in agrammatic patients: The effect of the Visual Cue Programme on spontaneous speech

Abstract

The Visual Cue Programme (VCP), a sentence-production programme, is presented and the effect on spontaneous speech in two chronic Broca's aphasia patients is reported. In an A-B-A-B design the effect was measured by the Aachen Aphasia Test, a sentence-processing test battery, and the linguistic analysis of spontaneous speech. The overall aphasia assessment shows no improvement; the sentence-processing test battery and the spontaneous speech analysis show different patterns in the two patients. One moderately impaired Broca patient shows improved production of verbs in isolation, associated with a more complete realization of verbs plus argument structures in spontaneous speech. The other patient, who has a severe Broca's aphasia, is characterized by better production of sentences and morphosyntactic elements in constrained production tasks, and absence of generalization of this morphosyntactic ability to spontaneous speech.