Date of Award

2010

Document Type

Campus Access Thesis

Department

Communication Sciences and Disorders

First Advisor

Julius Fridriksson

Abstract

Most treatment approaches used with people with aphasia include a phonological or semantic focus; many studies have examined the effectiveness of these approaches. Some studies have sought to determine if patients' impairment level is associated with treatment outcome following administration of a specific treatment approach. Several studies have produced conflicting and, therefore, inconclusive results concerning whether treatment specifics can be tailored towards a given patient's impairment level.

This study proposed that pre-treatment indicators of deficit type may be able to predict anomia treatment outcome. Pre-treatment indicators included counts of semantic and phonemic paraphasias; naming ability; and the abilities to make semantic associations, to repeat words and phrases, to follow directions, and to produce words fluently. After receiving two weeks of intensive semantic and phonological treatment through the use of cueing hierarchies, changes in the participants' correct naming scores and counts of semantic and phonemic paraphasias post-treatment were documented.

The analysis revealed that few relationships were strongly correlated and considered significant (p=.01). The strongest relationships revealed that post-treatment changes to participants' correct naming scores and paraphasia counts were similar following both treatment approaches, which suggests that utilizing a specific treatment approach for specific deficit type is perhaps not as necessary as was previously believed.

Rights

© 2010, Rebekah Dianne Degarmo

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