Clinical Forum Learning in aphasia therapy: It's not so much what you do, but how you do it!

The relationship between non-linguistic cognitive deficits and language recovery in patients with aphasia

“…In a study by Fillingham et al [9], the following factors affected the outcome of anomia therapy: episodic and working memory, reasoning abilities, generalization and abstraction, and the ability of behavior monitoring, dependent on attention functions. The importance of learning ability for successful rehabilitation was emphasized by Ferguson [10], as well as by Fillingham et al [11].…”

Assisting the Client in Aphasia Speech Therapy: A Sequential and Multimodal Analysis of Cueing Practices

“…Finally, the presence or absence of feedbacks has been connected with the application of error elimination, error reduction or error-full approaches to therapy (see Horton, 2008). These approaches, clearly based on the notion of "error", which has inspired different theories of learning for aphasia therapy (see, for a discussion, Ferguson, 1999;Horton, 2008), argue about alternative methods for handling the client's productions and to set the level of task difficulties. Nevertheless, there are no empirical investigations on how tasks are interactively realised, except for a study by Horton 2008 5 that explicitly addresses the issue of learning in aphasia therapy as a socially situated phenomenon and investigates the dynamics of naturally occurring therapeutic activities.…”

Factors influencing treatment-induced language recovery in chronic, post-stroke aphasia

“…Language is a complex, human phenomenon and how language learning and recovery in adults with aphasia occurs is poorly understood. Consequently, some researchers have focussed on the role of learning in adults with aphasia and the potential application of learning theory to advance aphasia rehabilitation (Ferguson, 1999;Gordon, 1999;Howard, 1999).…”

“…This is further supported by the work of Robertson and Murre (1999), who suggest that broader cognitive factors, such as sustained attention, are important considerations in the development and implementation of rehabilitation programs. A theory of learning underlies the therapeutic process and is an essential element in determining how therapy affects behavioural change (Ferguson, 1999 Tulving (1967) demonstrated that the process of actively recalling information from long-term memory results in the superior learning and retention of information when compared with an equivalent or even an increased amount of study time.…”

“…An understanding of the principles that govern adult learning may help to facilitate behavioural change in adults with acquired language disorders, such as aphasia (Hopper & Holland, 2005). As learning is central to the therapeutic process, principles of human learning are fundamental to the development of theoretically motivated aphasia rehabilitation programs and ultimately to the development of a theory of rehabilitation (Basso et al, 2001;Ferguson, 1999).…”