Department of Psychology and York Neuroimaging Centre, University of York, York, UK.
Laboratory of Neuroimaging and Innovative Molecular Tracers (NIMTlab), Geneva University Neurocenter and Faculty of Medicine, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Neuropsychol Rehabil. 2022 Aug;32(7):1429-1455. doi: 10.1080/09602011.2021.1895847. Epub 2021 Mar 14.
Semantic therapy in post-stroke aphasia typically focusses on strengthening links between conceptual representations and their lexical-articulatory forms to aid word retrieval. However, research has shown that semantic deficits in this group can affect both verbal and non-verbal tasks, particularly in patients with deregulated retrieval as opposed to degraded knowledge. This study, therefore, aimed to facilitate semantic cognition in a sample of such patients with post-stroke semantic aphasia (SA) by training the identification of both strong and weak semantic associations and providing explicit pictorial feedback that demonstrated both common and more unusual ways of linking concepts together. We assessed the effects of this training on (i) trained and untrained items; and (ii) trained and untrained tasks in eleven individuals with SA. In the training task, the SA group showed improvement with practice, particularly for trained items. A similar untrained task using pictorial stimuli (Camel and Cactus Test) also improved. Together, these results suggest that semantic training can be beneficial in patients with SA and may show some degree of generalization to untrained situations. Future research should seek to understand which patients are most likely to benefit from this type of training.
脑卒中后失语症的语义治疗通常侧重于加强概念表示与其词汇-发音形式之间的联系，以帮助单词检索。然而，研究表明，该组的语义缺陷会影响口头和非口头任务，特别是在检索失调而不是知识退化的患者中。因此，这项研究旨在通过训练识别强和弱语义关联并提供明确的图片反馈来促进一组患有脑卒中后语义性失语症（SA）的患者的语义认知，这些反馈展示了将概念联系起来的常见和更不常见的方式。我们评估了这种训练对（i）训练和未训练项目；以及（ii）十一名 SA 患者的训练和未训练任务的影响。在训练任务中，SA 组随着练习而表现出改善，特别是对于训练项目。使用图片刺激的类似未训练任务（骆驼和仙人掌测试）也得到了改善。总之，这些结果表明，语义训练对 SA 患者有益，并且可能在一定程度上对未训练情况进行泛化。未来的研究应寻求了解哪种类型的患者最有可能从这种类型的训练中受益。
