We aimed to enhance the performance of naming and sentence production in chronic post-stroke aphasia by tablet-based language training combined with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) conducted on non-consecutive days. We applied a deblocking method involved in stimulation–facilitation therapy to six participants with chronic aphasia who performed naming and sentence production tasks for impaired modalities, immediately after a spoken-word picture-matching task for an intact modality. The participants took part in two conditional sessions: a tDCS condition in which they performed a spoken word-picture matching task while we delivered an anodal tDCS over the left inferior frontal cortex; and a sham condition in which sham stimulation was delivered. We hypothesized that, compared with the sham stimulation, the application of anodal tDCS over the left inferior frontal cortex during the performance of tasks requiring access to semantic representations would enhance the deblocking effect, thereby improving the performances for subsequent naming and sentence production. Our results showed greater improvements 2 weeks after training with tDCS than those after training with sham stimulation. The accuracy rate of naming was significantly higher in the tDCS condition than in the sham condition, regardless of whether the words were trained or not. Also, we found a significant improvement in the production of related words and sentences for the untrained words in the tDCS condition, compared with that found pre-training, while in the sham condition we found no significant improvement compared with that found pre-training. These results support our hypothesis and suggest the effectiveness of the use of tDCS during language training on non-consecutive days.

中文翻译：

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经颅直流电刺激促进失语症训练

我们旨在通过基于平板电脑的语言训练结合非连续日进行的经颅直流电刺激 (tDCS) 来提高慢性中风后失语症的命名和句子生成性能。我们对 6 名患有慢性失语症的参与者应用了一种涉及刺激促进疗法的去块化方法，他们在针对完整模式的口语图片匹配任务之后立即执行了受损模式的命名和造句任务。参与者参加了两个有条件的会议：一个 tDCS 条件，他们执行口语单词-图片匹配任务，而我们在左下额叶皮层上提供阳极 tDCS；以及提供假刺激的假条件。我们假设，与假刺激相比，在需要访问语义表征的任务执行期间，在左下额叶皮层上应用阳极 tDCS 将增强去块效应，从而提高后续命名和句子生成的性能。我们的结果表明，在接受 tDCS 训练后 2 周，比接受假刺激训练后的改善更大。无论单词是否经过训练，tDCS条件下的命名准确率均显着高于sham条件。此外，我们发现与预训练相比，tDCS 条件下未训练单词的相关单词和句子的生成有显着改善，而在虚假条件下，我们发现与预训练相比没有显着改善。