Treating agrammatic aphasia within a linguistic framework: Treatment of Underlying Forms

Abstract

Background-Formal linguistic properties of sentences-both lexical, i.e., argument structure, and syntactic, i.e., movement-as well as what is known about normal and disordered sentence processing and production, were considered in the development of Treatment of Underlying Forms (TUF), a linguistic approach to treatment of sentence deficits in patients with agrammatic aphasia. TUF is focused on complex, non-canonical sentence structures and operates on the premise that training underlying, abstract, properties of language will allow for effective generalisation to untrained structures that share similar linguistic properties, particularly those of lesser complexity.

Evaluating Treatment and Generalization Patterns of Two Theoretically Motivated Sentence Comprehension Therapies

“…In particular, as noted in the introduction, studies of the TUF approach (Ballard & Thompson, 1999;Jacobs & Thompson, 2000;Thompson & Shapiro, 2005;Thompson et al, 1993Thompson et al, , 1996Thompson et al, , 1997 frequently observed greater generalization to sentences with the same type of movement than to sentences with a different type of movement. Furthermore, it is important to highlight that the focus of the treatments in the current study was on the identification of thematic role in comprehension, which addresses movement only implicitly.…”

“…One of the goals of TUF is to promote generalization from trained to untrained sentences; therefore, researchers systematically probe progress on syntactically related and unrelated untrained sentence structures. It has been found that generalization following TUF is greatest to linguistically related sentences (Ballard & Thompson, 1999;Jacobs & Thompson, 2000;Thompson & Shapiro, 2005;Thompson, Shapiro, & Roberts, 1993;Thompson, Shapiro, Tait, Jacobs, & Schneider, 1996;Thompson et al, 1997), lending support for specific deficit hypotheses that suggest that specific syntactic operations lie at the root of deficits. Furthermore, generalization occurs frequently from complex to simple structures but less frequently from simple to complex structures (Thompson, Ballard, & Shapiro, 1998;Thompson & Shapiro, 2005Thompson, Shapiro, Kiran, & Sobecks, 2003;Thompson et al, 1993Thompson et al, , 1997.…”

“…It has been found that generalization following TUF is greatest to linguistically related sentences (Ballard & Thompson, 1999;Jacobs & Thompson, 2000;Thompson & Shapiro, 2005;Thompson, Shapiro, & Roberts, 1993;Thompson, Shapiro, Tait, Jacobs, & Schneider, 1996;Thompson et al, 1997), lending support for specific deficit hypotheses that suggest that specific syntactic operations lie at the root of deficits. Furthermore, generalization occurs frequently from complex to simple structures but less frequently from simple to complex structures (Thompson, Ballard, & Shapiro, 1998;Thompson & Shapiro, 2005Thompson, Shapiro, Kiran, & Sobecks, 2003;Thompson et al, 1993Thompson et al, , 1997. Together, these observations have led to the establishment of the complexity account of treatment efficacy (CATE), which states that training complex sentences leads to generalization to less complex sentences with shared underlying linguistic properties (Ballard & Thompson, 1999;Jacobs & Thompson, 2000;Thompson & Shapiro, 1995Thompson et al, 1997Thompson et al, , 1998Thompson et al, , 2003.…”

“…Mapping therapy, for example, is designed to repair impaired mapping between sentence constituents and thematic roles (Byng, 1988;Byng, Nickels, & Black, 1994;Haendiges, Berndt, & Mitchum, 1996;Jones, 1986;Le Dorze, Jacob, & Coderre, 1991;Marshall, Pring, & Chiat, 1993;Mitchum, Haendiges, & Berndt, 1995;Nickels, Byng, & Black, 1991;Rochon, Laird, Bose, & Scofield, 2005;Schwartz, Saffran, Fink, Myers, & Martin, 1994; for a review, see Fink, 2001). Likewise, the treatment of underlying forms (TUF; Thompson & Shapiro, 2005) guides PWA through the processes of relearning specific syntactic operations such as reordering constituents of sentences that involve noun phrase (NP) movement or wh-movement. Mapping therapies and TUF have been influenced by specific deficit accounts that propose that syntactic structure is at the source of comprehension deficits.…”

Afasia transcortical motora: un reporte de caso

“…Más recientemente los estudios sobre el tratamiento de la afasia han estudiado los efectos de intervenciones específicas para ciertos défi-cits del lenguaje; de manera tal que sus diseños han involucrado comparaciones intra e intergrupo y diseños experimentales controlados (12,13,14,15,16).…”