Effect of speech therapy intervention program for non-fluent aphasic patients after stroke

Abstract

Purpose: the objective of this paper is to verify the effect of speech therapy intervention program in patients with non-fluent aphasia due to stroke in language tasks related to verbal fluency in semantic and phonological categories. Methods: Patients with aphasia due to stroke were selected to take part in this study. Two groups were formed: diagnosed patients with Broca/transcortical motor aphasia (GA), and a control group (healthy individuals). GA took a fluency verbal task (FAS, other complementary categories: phonological /p/ /l/ and semantic: “fruits” and “names”). These patients were all engaged in a language intervention program developed by the authors of this study. GA received speech therapy sessions (ten sessions lasting for an hour once a week), following a specific language program. After the sessions, the patients were re-evaluated. Results: GA had statistical significant improvement in the verbal fluency task after the speech therapy program (p-value < 0,001). Conclusion: The speech language therapy program we proposed was efficient enough to show improvement in the results for GA in the verbal fluency task.