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Word Finding Deficits In Adults With Aphasia

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Word Finding Deficits in Adults with Aphasia
I. Introduction on Adults with Aphasia Aphasia is communication disorder that impairs a person language as a result of brain damage (WebMD Medical, 2014). The disorder impacts a person receptive and expressive communication abilities as well as reading and written language. Aphasia makes it difficult for people to communicate effectively with others that can lead to misunderstanding their needs or wants. Brain damage can result from a stroke, head injury, brain tumor, an infection or dementia. There are several types of aphasia in which each type of impairment are classified into two general categories of fluent aphasia and non-fluent aphasia. Fluent aphasia demonstrates a person's ability …show more content…

A new technique of word discrimination therapy has been used for the treatment of phonological word-finding impairment (Fisher, Wilshire, & Ponsford, 2009). In aphasia, word finding impairments are based on the two-stage model of word production. The first stage is the lexical selection. Lexical selection is the ability to select the most appropriate word when given the available conceptual/semantic information (Fisher, Wilshire, & Ponsford, 2009). The second stage is the phonological encoding. Phonological encoding is the ability to retrieve information from a network that contains nodes representing the different types of linguistic units (Fisher, Wilshire, & Ponsford, 2009). If the lexical selection stage is damaged, then the patient may select a semantically related word rather than the appropriate word to match the concept (Fisher, Wilshire, & Ponsford, 2009). Then, if the phonological encoding stage is damaged, the patient will produce phonological errors that may consist of partial phonological and/or substitutions of incorrect phonemes in words (Fisher, Wilshire, & Ponsford, 2009). The patient may also have difficulties with oral reading and word repetition tasks. In word discrimination therapy, the aphasic patient is trained on their production of words in different context. The patient is trained on a set of phonologically …show more content…

The results show that there were little phonemic paraphasias in the therapy treatment compared to the baseline phase. A similar decrease was evident in the client’s dysfluent hesitations, and rates of all other errors such as formal paraphasias and semantic paraphasias were lower during the therapy session (Fisher, Wilshire, & Ponsford, 2009). Word discrimination therapy demonstrated that gains were significantly faster for the words that were trained within phonologically related triplets compared to those trained in unrelated triplet sets. Following the therapy session, the client was reassessed during the maintenance testing after three months of post-therapy. The outcome indicated that the therapy gains were well maintained over time for both related and unrelated sets. The examination of error types showed that phonemic paraphasias, dysfluent hesitations, formal paraphasias, and semantic paraphasias remained well below when observed during baseline testing in both related and unrelated items during the treatment phases (Fisher, Wilshire, & Ponsford,

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