Syntactic disorders in aphasia: From theory to therapy

The objective of this intervention study was to evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention program focusing on the production of non-canonical sentences. Hypotheses about the occurrence of treatment effects were formulated on the basis of syntactic complexity, referring to the amount of syntactic phrase structures necessary to generate specific German sentence structures.

A multiple single case study with seven agrammatic participants was applied, each participant receiving training in the production of object-relative-clauses and who-questions. The investigation was designed to unambiguously evaluate for each individual, structure specific and generalized learning effects with respect to the production of object-relative-clauses, who-questions and passive sentences. Results showed significant improvements for all sentences types.

Stadie, N., Schröder, A., Postler, J., Lorenz, A., Swoboda-Moll, M., Burchert, F., & De Bleser, R. (2008). Unambiguous generalization effects after treatment of non-canonical sentence production in German agrammatism. Brain and Language, 114, 211-229.

Schröder, A., Lorenz, A., Burchert, F., & Stadie, N. (2009). Komplexe Sätze. Störungen der Satzproduktion: Materialien für Diagnostik, Therapie und Evaluation.Hofheim: NAT-Verlag.

nstadie@uni-potsdam.de; astrid.schroeder@uni-potsdam.de

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treatment, generalization effects, syntactic complexity, agrammatism