| Abstract: |
The present treatment examined a model-based treatment to facilitate oral reading skills in a patient with anomic aphasia and severe alexia. Pretreatment evaluation revealed that this patient presented with impaired grapheme to phoneme conversion, impaired connection between visual input lexicon (VIL) and semantic system (SS), and milder impairments in speech output lexicon (SOL) and grapheme output lexicon (GOL). Using a case study design, treatment was initiated on oral reading on one set of words, whereas generalization was tested to oral reading on a set of semantically related words as well as written naming and visual lexical decision of trained and untrained words. Results revealed improvement on oral reading of trained words, semantically related untrained words, written naming of trained and untrained items, and to a list of untrained words varied in letter length (drawn from the Psycholinguistic Assessment of Language Processing in Aphasia [PALPA] ). A follow-up evaluation conducted two and half years post stroke revealed maintenance of reading skills. These results suggest that model based treatment and semantic feature analysis are useful in facilitating improvements and generalization to oral reading and written naming. These results further suggest that therapy provided during the early phase of recovery may have long lasting beneficial effects on reading abilities. |
