Background: Verb production is often impaired in Broca's aphasia: Action naming is more affected than object naming and in spontaneous speech the number and/or diversity of lexical verbs is low. Because verbs play a pivotal role in the sentence, these verb problems have a serious impact on the communicative contents of speech in daily life. Aims: The purpose of this study was to increase the informational content of spontaneous speech in two individuals with Broca's aphasia by training them in verb production. Methods & Procedures: Verb production was trained at the sentence level, using the treatment programme Verb Production at the Word and Sentence Level (Bastiaanse, Jonkers, Quak, & Varela, 1997). Six baseline sessions were planned, followed by a training programme to learn infinitives, finite verbs, and sentence construction in one participant and finite verbs, infinitives, and sentences in the other. The participants were tested each week for progress on infinitives and finite verbs not in the programme and an unrelated test. Pre-treatment and post-treatment (directly after and 3 months after treatment stopped) the Aachen Aphasia Test (AAT) and the Amsterdam-Nijmegen Everyday Language Test (ANELT) were administered and spontaneous speech was elicited and analysed with respect to verbs, nouns, and utterance length. Outcomes & Results: Both participants improved significantly on the production of untrained finite verbs. No improvement was made on the untrained infinitives. There was also significant improvement on related subtests of the AAT, but no improvement on unrelated subtests. Both also showed a significant improvement on verb production in spontaneous speech and in verbal communication, as measured on the ANELT. Conclusions. The treatment programme has been shown to be an effective tool for training participants in verb production. The most important criteria for relevant treatment were met: generalisation to spontaneous speech and improvement in verbal communication.
The field of Holocaust studies relies on a wide variety of archives, dispersed all over the world. Identifying the right sources for a specific research question within this field is not easy or straightforward. Yet Holocaust scholars predominately focus on methodologies for source analysis rather than discovery. Archival finding aids are among the most important tools to aid primary source discovery, but have hitherto not been considered in methodological discussions on Holocaust research. In this article we will reflect on the composition of finding aids based on our work for the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI). Our premise is that the content of finding aids is determined by their authors and the context in which they are creating them. The strongest argument for this subjectivity is that our workoutlined in this article -not only indicates that descriptions of one and the same source differ, but that they can do so quite considerably, and hence can influence research. Our stance is that historians optimize their profit from finding aids by becoming more sensitive to the subjectivity and authorship of descriptions. We conclude by showing how an online environment such as the one developed by EHRI can sensitize historians and archivists to the situated and subjective nature of finding aids by accommodating a plurality of descriptive voices, and encourage them to share their knowledge and become co-authors of finding aids.
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