The efficacy of deficit-specific therapy materials

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Abstract
The efficacy of therapy materials aimed at improving moderately impaired aphasic patients' communicative abilities was examined. Patients were confronted with communicative settings in which a dialogue between two speakers took place and their task was to produce the dialogue utterances. All dialogue utterances called for the use of modal verbs which, in German, frequently express the illocutionary force of an utterance. Improvement was measured by a control test in which treated linguistic forms had to be produced as responses to questions at the end of short narratives. A significant improvement in general expressive abilities was found; however, the improvement was not specific to the treated forms. The findings are discussed with regard to theoretical issues of therapy evaluation.