Language and Cognition seminar - Dr Sharon Adjei-Nicol

Assessment and Treatment in Global Aphasia: Current issues and a new approach.

Global aphasia is a severe communication disorder affecting all language modalities, commonly caused by stroke. Evidence as to whether the functional communication of people with global aphasia (PwGA) can improve after speech and language therapy is limited and conflicting. This is partly because cognition is essential for successful functional communication and in global aphasia it can be severely impaired. However, a further issue is that demonstrating change and measuring functional communication in global aphasia can be difficult. Cognitive treatments aimed at improving functional communication in people with aphasia exist, but few have been trialled with PwGA and none have robustly demonstrated gains or measured functional communication outcomes.

This presentation will outline the development of a novel functional communication assessment (known as the Interaction Profiling Tool; INTERPReT) and a novel non-linguistic cognitive intervention for global aphasia. Following this, the promising findings of a case series study that piloted the INTERPReT and investigated the effect of the novel intervention on functional communication will be presented.