Aphasia
Conditions
Interventions
According to a treatment protocol, SimpTell will the administered for a period of 6 weeks (30 hours in total) either as:
(1) blended care (parallel in-person speech and language therapy)
2) Telethera
Sponsors
Centre for Language Studies (CLS), Radboud University, Nijmegen (The Netherlands)
Eligibility
Inclusion criteria
Inclusion criteria: - Age between 16 and 75 years old - Unilateral left hemispheric stroke - At least 6 months post-onset (chronic stage) - Disordered sentence production (expressive agrammatism) due to aphasia. On the 6-point scale of the subtest Spontaneous Speech of the Dutch version of the Aachen Aphasia Test (AAT; Graetz, De Bleser, & Willmes, 1992), the syntactic structure of the participant’s speech output should be rated as 1 (mostly one or two word utterances; almost no inflection forms or function words) or 2 (short, simple sentences, which are mostly syntactically incomplete; frequent absence of function words and inflected forms). - Native speaker of Dutch - Pre-morbidly right handed - The participant should approve the proposed aim, which is promoting the overuse of ellipses (telegraphic style)
Exclusion criteria
Exclusion criteria: - A history of previous stroke - Aphasia caused by tumor or trauma - Severe aphasia (unable to understand instructions or provide consent). This is operationalised via score on either (1) the Dutch Comprehensive Aphasia Test (CAT-NL; Visch-Brink, Vandenborre, De Smet & Marien, 2014) OR (2) the Dutch version of the Aachen Aphasia Test (AAT; Graetz, De Bleser, & Willmes, 1992). (1) CAT-NL: Subtest 9 [Comprehension of spoken sentences]: a score of 18 (out of 32) or below, and Subtest 10 [Comprehension of written sentences]: a score of 14 (out of 32) or below. (2) AAT: Subtest TB 1&2 [Comprehension of spoken language]: a score of 33 (out of 60) or below, and Subtest TB 3&4 [Comprehension of written language]: a score of 30 (out of 60) or below, - (Even with visual aid) profound visual perceptual disorders; - (Even with hearing aid) profound hearing deficit; - Psychiatric or neurological disorders (other than stroke) - Severe apraxia of speech or severe dysarthria (criterion: more than 5% unintelligible speech output).
Design outcomes
Primary
| Measure | Time frame |
|---|---|
| 1) Quantitative measure of verbal effectiveness (Ruiter, Kolk, Rietveld, Dijkstra & Lotgering, 2011), based on experimentally adapted scenarios of the ANELT (Blomert, Koster & Kean, 1995) and Picture Description Task (2008) 2) Quantitative measure of verbal efficiency (Ruiter, Kolk, Rietveld, Dijkstra & Lotgering, 2011), based on experimentally adapted scenarios of the ANELT (Blomert, Koster & Kean, 1995) and Picture Description Task (2008) | — |
Secondary
| Measure | Time frame |
|---|---|
| 1) Percentage of words produced in ellipses (WIE; Ruiter, Kolk, Rietveld & Feddema, 2013) in the ANELT and PDT [Administered at T1 and T2] 2) Percentage of grammatically well-formed sentences produced in the Sentence Order and Inflection Test (SOIT; Kok, Kolk,& Haverkort, 2006), to control for spontaneous recovery [Administered at T1 and T2] 3) Token Test (36-item version, De Renzi & Fraglioni, 1978) as a measure of overall severity of aphasia [Administered at T1 ] | — |
Contacts
Public ContactMarina Ruiter
Radboud University
Outcome results
None listed