ABSTRACT

Semantic therapy in post-stroke aphasia typically focusses on strengthening links between conceptual representations and their lexical-articulatory forms to aid word retrieval. However, research has shown that semantic deficits in this group can affect both verbal and non-verbal tasks, particularly in patients with deregulated retrieval as opposed to degraded knowledge. This study, therefore, aimed to facilitate semantic cognition in a sample of such patients with post-stroke semantic aphasia (SA) by training the identification of both strong and weak semantic associations and providing explicit pictorial feedback that demonstrated both common and more unusual ways of linking concepts together. We assessed the effects of this training on (i) trained and untrained items; and (ii) trained and untrained tasks in eleven individuals with SA. In the training task, the SA group showed improvement with practice, particularly for trained items. A similar untrained task using pictorial stimuli (Camel and Cactus Test) also improved. Together, these results suggest that semantic training can be beneficial in patients with SA and may show some degree of generalization to untrained situations. Future research should seek to understand which patients are most likely to benefit from this type of training.

摘要

中风后失语症的语义治疗通常侧重于加强概念表征与其词汇-发音形式之间的联系，以帮助检索单词。然而，研究表明，这一组的语义缺陷会影响口头和非口头任务，特别是在检索不受控制而不是知识退化的患者中。因此，本研究旨在通过训练对强语义关联和弱语义关联的识别并提供明确的图片反馈来展示中风后语义失语症 (SA) 患者样本中的语义认知，以展示常见的和不寻常的方式将概念联系在一起。我们评估了此培训对 (i) 受过训练和未受过训练的项目的影响；(ii) 在 11 个 SA 个体中训练和未训练的任务。在训练任务中，SA 组通过练习表现出进步，特别是在训练项目方面。使用图形刺激（骆驼和仙人掌测试）的类似未经训练的任务也有所改进。总之，这些结果表明语义训练对 SA 患者有益，并且可能对未经训练的情况表现出一定程度的泛化。未来的研究应该设法了解哪些患者最有可能从此类培训中受益。