| Abstract: |
The effects of auditory-visual stimulation treatment derived from principles associated with a stimulation approach for aphasia treatment and direct-production treatment derived from a behavioral or learning approach were examined in 4 neurologically stable agrammatic aphasic Ss (aged 35-58 yrs). Ss were trained to produce selected exemplars of wh interrogative morphemes in complete sentence contexts, while the acquisition, response generalization, stimulus generalization, and maintenance effects of the 2 treatments were assessed. Results indicate that direct-production treatment was consistently more effective than auditory-visual stimulation treatment in facilitating acquisition of target responses for all Ss. Response generalization within interrogative forms paralleled acquisition regardless of treatment approach. Stimulus generalization to the elicited language-sample condition was not evident; however, trained responses were maintained subsequent to treatment. Data support the use of direct-production treatment for interrogative intervention with agrammatic aphasic patients and indicate that training a selected number of exemplars of target interrogatives results in generalization of that question form to novel language responses. However, the lack of generalization across interrogatives indicated that wh interrogatives do not constitute a response class and, thus, reveal the need for programming generalization to untrained members of that linguistic class and to spontaneous language. The stimulus items are appended. |
