Exploring the effects of verb and noun treatment on verb phrase production in primary progressive aphasia: A series of single case experimental design studies

ABSTRACT

Evidence of generalization to connected speech following lexical retrieval treatment in Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) is scarce. Consequently, this study systematically investigated changes in verb phrase production following lexical retrieval treatment in a series of single case experimental design studies. Four individuals with PPA (three semantic- and one logopenic variant PPA) who had previously demonstrated that they could integrate verbs and nouns into sentence structures in a cueing paradigm, undertook a sequence of verb and noun lexical retrieval treatments using Repetition and Reading in the Presence of a Picture. Production of treated nouns- and/or verbs-in-isolation significantly improved following treatment for three of the four participants. Verb phrase production did not improve for one of these participants (logopenic PPA), perhaps due to the relatively small treatment dose. Two participants (semantic variant PPA) did, however, demonstrate across-level generalization, with improvement in treated verbs and using those verbs in (untreated) verb phrases. Their verb phrase production improved most after lexical retrieval treatment for both nouns and verbs, suggesting this combined approach may benefit across-level generalization for some individuals in clinical practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Lexical retrieval treatment
• across-level generalization
• primary progressive aphasia
• nouns
• verbs

Acknowledgements

This project was supported by the Macquarie University Research Excellence Scholarship (MQRES) held by Cathleen Taylor-Rubin. We would like to thank Aimee Downing for her generous work as a blind rater of probe responses. We would also like to thank the volunteers who provided data for verb phrase responses and imageability of object and actions. Most particularly, we would like to thank the individuals with PPA who gave their time and effort participating in the study and their families and close others who supported them throughout.

Disclosure Statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Macquarie University [grant number Macquarie University Research Excellence Scholarsh].