Aphasia rehabilitation with a case of agrammatism: A partial replication

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Abstract
A replication of Jones' (1986) therapy study was attempted with a young agrammatic aphasic subject (M.G.) who had demonstrated little improvement in 6 months of traditional treatment directed at improving oral expression. At the end of therapy the patient's verbal output was very limited, and consisted mainly of nouns. He was hypothesized to have a problem accessing verbs and in obtaining access to the meaning relations attached to them. The experimental therapy was directed towards focusing his attention on verbs and on verbal meaning relations in sentences. In particular, the actor, the patient and the locative arguments were emphasized. M.G. was seen 14 and 15 months post-CVA before therapy began. He did not change in oral expression or written language comprehension during this period. Therapy lasted 1 month. M. G.'s performance improved greatly in terms of the number of verbs and the number of verb and argument combinations produced for both control and experimental items. Maintenance of a high performance for the treated and control items was also observed 1 month after therapy had ended. Some improvement in a spontaneous narrative task was also observed immediately after therapy had ended, but it was not maintained after therapy was discontinued for a month. In a control task of written language comprehension the patient's behaviour did not change across the four observation times. These results essentially support those of Jones.

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