Department of Cognitive Science, ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Macquarie University, Sydney 2113, Australia.
St. Vincent's Health, Sydney 2010, Australia.
J Int Neuropsychol Soc. 2020 Jan;26(1):72-85. doi: 10.1017/S1355617719001012.
Group treatment enables people with aphasia to practise communication skills outside the typical clinician-patient dyad. While there is evidence that this treatment format can improve participation in everyday communication, there is little evidence it impacts linguistic abilities. This project aimed to investigate the effects of 'typical' group treatment on the communication skills of people with aphasia with a focus on word retrieval in discourse.
Three people with aphasia took part in a 6-week group therapy programme. Each week focused on a different topic, and three topics also received a home programme targeting word retrieval. The six treated topics were compared with two control topics, with regard to language production in connected speech. Semistructured interviews were collected twice prior to treatment and twice following the treatment and analysed using (a) word counts; (b) the profile of word errors and retrieval in speech; (c) a measure of propositional idea density, and (d) perceptual discourse ratings.
Two participants showed no significant improvements; one participant showed significant improvement on discourse ratings.
This study provides limited support for group treatment, leading to improved communication as measured by semistructured interviews, even when supplemented with a home programme. We suggest that either group treatment, as implemented here, was not an effective approach for improving communication for our participants and/or that outcome measurement was limited by difficulty assessing changes in connected speech.
群体治疗使失语症患者能够在典型的医患二人组之外练习沟通技巧。虽然有证据表明这种治疗形式可以提高日常交流的参与度，但几乎没有证据表明它会影响语言能力。本项目旨在研究“典型”群体治疗对失语症患者沟通技能的影响，重点关注语篇中的单词检索。
3 名失语症患者参加了为期 6 周的小组治疗计划。每周的重点都不同，其中 3 个主题还接受了针对单词检索的家庭治疗计划。对 6 个治疗主题和 2 个对照主题进行了比较，以评估连贯言语中的语言生成。在治疗前和治疗后进行了两次半结构化访谈，并使用（a）单词计数；（b）言语错误和检索模式；（c）命题想法密度的测量；（d）感知话语评分等方法进行分析。
两名参与者没有显著改善；一名参与者在话语评分上有显著提高。
本研究为群体治疗提供了有限的支持，通过半结构化访谈测量，即使辅以家庭治疗计划，也能提高沟通能力。我们认为，要么是这里实施的群体治疗对我们的参与者的沟通没有有效帮助，要么是由于评估连贯言语变化的难度，导致结果测量受限。
