Effects of clinician behaviors on acceptability of patients' responses in aphasia treatment sessions.

Records of the content of 40 videotaped samples of aphasia treatment sessions were prepared. These records were analyzed to determine (a) whether certain clinician behaviors and task characteristics are related to the occurrence of patient error responses in speech and language treatment sessions for aphasic individuals, and (b) whether "errors generate errors"; that is, whether error responses tend to occur in clusters rather than being distributed uniformly throughout the treatment session. The results of these analyses indicated that a number of event categories were significantly related to the occurrence of unacceptable patient responses. These results suggest that certain clinician behaviors generate patient error responses and also that clinicians tend to response to patient errors in characteristic ways. An analysis of these results also confirmed that unacceptable patient responses tended to occur in clusters.