| Abstract: |
The Visual Cue Programme (VCP), a sentence-production program, is presented and its effect on spontaneous speech in 2 chronic Broca's aphasia patients is reported. In an A-B-A-B design, the effect was measured by the Aachen Aphasia Test, a sentence-processing test battery, and the linguistic analysis of spontaneous speech. The overall aphasia assessment shows no improvement; the sentence-processing test battery and the spontaneous speech analysis show different patterns in the 2 patients. One moderately impaired Broca patient (a 56-yr-old woman) shows improved production of verbs in isolation, associated with a more complete realization of verbs plus argument structures in spontaneous speech. The other patient (a 42-yr-old man), who has a severe Broca's aphasia, is characterized by better production of sentences and morphosyntactic elements in constrained production tasks, and absence of generalization of this morphosyntactic ability to spontaneous speech. |
