The Aphasia Mash Up Project - 1271 Words

This aphasia mash-up project is intended to remediate lexical retrieval at the discourse level in a variety of communication settings and communication partners relevant to the patient’s interests. People with Aphasia often have difficulty with word retrieval which limits discourse capacity. This in turn negatively effects communication interactions with others and increases isolation. Therefore, therapy is often centered around improving word retrieval that will facilitate communication with others. Unfortunately, trained skills in therapy have demonstrated varying levels of generalization. There are several treatment approaches that have demonstrated efficacy for individuals with aphasia such as Semantic Feature Analysis. A limitation with this method is that it focuses on nouns and has not shown limited generalization to generalize to discourse and hashave not shown significant evidence for maintenance (Kiran Bassetto 2008). Another approach used in therapy is the use of v erbs. Verbs are central to syntax, semantics and event memory. Therefore, VNeST is effective because it targets semantic networks based around verbs, which also targets things such as nouns, syntax, and thematic roles. Verbs are expected to activate more neural networks in comparison to targeting nouns alone. Furthermore, previous studies have used VNeST and shown to be beneficial to patients with moderate fluent and non-fluent aphasia (Edmonds et al. 2009). The first article used investigated the