Treatment of Grammatical Time Marking in Post-Stroke Aphasia

NCT ID: NCT05656638

Last Updated: 2024-05-14

Basic Information

• Recruitment Status: COMPLETED
• Clinical Phase: NA
• Total Enrollment: 6 participants
• Study Classification: INTERVENTIONAL
• Study Start Date: 2022-12-30
• Study Completion Date: 2024-04-16

Brief Summary

The study aims to assess an individual or self-administered computer therapy's effectiveness in grammatical time marking. The main objective is to examine whether the therapy improves grammatical time marking of inflected verbs treated on the sessions. We also explore whether the observed progress can be transferred to untrained items, more ecological contexts and if is maintained two and four weeks after the end of treatment.

This therapy will be administered to six individuals with brain lesions after stroke. Four individuals will take part of the individual therapy and two individuals will take part of the self-administered computer therapy. The therapy will last one month, at the rate of three weekly sessions of approximately one hour.

Conditions

Brain Injury, Vascular; Aphasia; Stroke

Study Design

• Allocation Method: NA
• Intervention Model: SINGLE_GROUP
• Primary Study Purpose: TREATMENT
• Blinding Strategy: NONE

Study Groups

Brain-injured participants

Participants with post-stroke fluent or non-fluent chronic aphasia

Group Type: EXPERIMENTAL

Speech and language therapy

Intervention Type: BEHAVIORAL

The treatment focuses on grammatical time marking. The aim of the treatment is to train underlying grammatical time marking processes, which were identified as deficient during a preliminary evaluation. The intervention is composed of 4 steps inspired by models and hypotheses from the literature on the subject. Step 1: "temporal adverbial selection", subject must identify the tense encoded in sentences and select the correct adverbial among those proposed. Step 2: "selection of inflected verb forms", subject must identify the tense encoded in the sentence and select the correct verb form among those proposed. Step 3: "production of inflected verb forms", subject must identify the tense encoded in the sentence and produce inflected verbs. Step 4: "semantic narration", subject must describe scenes using verbs inflected according to the previously defined reference time.

Interventions

Speech and language therapy

The treatment focuses on grammatical time marking. The aim of the treatment is to train underlying grammatical time marking processes, which were identified as deficient during a preliminary evaluation. The intervention is composed of 4 steps inspired by models and hypotheses from the literature on the subject. Step 1: "temporal adverbial selection", subject must identify the tense encoded in sentences and select the correct adverbial among those proposed. Step 2: "selection of inflected verb forms", subject must identify the tense encoded in the sentence and select the correct verb form among those proposed. Step 3: "production of inflected verb forms", subject must identify the tense encoded in the sentence and produce inflected verbs. Step 4: "semantic narration", subject must describe scenes using verbs inflected according to the previously defined reference time.

Intervention Type: BEHAVIORAL

Eligibility Criteria

Inclusion Criteria

• Have had an imaging-objectified stroke in adulthood that resulted in aphasia (fluent or non-fluent). The time between the stroke and participation in this study must be greater than 6 months.
• Be a native French speaker or have excellent mastery of French.
• Be between 18 and 75 years old.
• Present grammatical tense marking disorders objectified by language evaluation (deficit scores on the "Batterie d'Évaluation de la Production Syntaxique" (BEPS) verb flexion task, Monetta et al., 2018; and/or on the "Test d'expression morpho-syntaxique fine" (T.E.M.F.) active sentence production subtask, Bernaert-Paul and Simonin, 2011).

Exclusion Criteria

• Present chronic symptoms of a substance use disorder as defined by Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) criteria.
• Have significant uncorrected vision and/or hearing impairment.
• Have significant impairments in oral/written comprehension.
• Present apraxia of speech or a severe arthritic disorder
• Present hemineglect
• Present impaired judgment and discernment, objectified by a neuropsychological evaluation

• Minimum Eligible Age: 18 Years
• Maximum Eligible Age: 75 Years
• Eligible Sex: ALL
• Accepts Healthy Volunteers: No

Sponsors

University of Neuchatel

OTHER

Sponsor Role: lead

Responsible Party

Marion Fossard

Professor

Responsibility Role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR

Locations

Université de Neuchâtel

Neuchâtel, , Switzerland

Countries

Switzerland

Other Identifiers

Unine2022-01807

Identifier Type: -

Identifier Source: org_study_id