Rehabilitation of Post-stroke Aphasia by Targeting Phonological, and Lexico-semantic Deficits With Speech Output Tasks

Aphasia in brain-damaged adult patients refers "to the more or less complete loss of the ability to use language" resulting from acquired brain damage, typically of the left hemisphere. The defective spoken output of persons with aphasia (PWA) has anomia as a main clinical manifestation. Improving anomia is a main goal of any language treatment. The present randomized controlled study assessed the effectiveness of a novel, two-week, rehabilitation protocol (PHOLEXSEM), focused on PHonological, SEmantic, and LExical deficits, aiming at improving lexical retrieval, and, generally, spoken output. The effects of the PHOLEXSEM treatment were compared to those of a control treatment, i.e., a Promoting Aphasics Communicative Effectiveness (PACE) protocol. Finally, we studied the effects of age, education, disease duration, brain lesion volume, and functional independence (Functional Idependence Measure, FIM) on the treatment-induced linguistic improvements.