Presentation
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The effectiveness of intensive mapping therapy in treating Chinese fluent and nonfluent aphasia
Poster C67 in Poster Session C, Friday, October 7, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm EDT, Millennium Hall
Haiyan Wang1, Lijun Ge2; 1Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 2China-Japan Friendship Hospital
Introduction Mapping therapy (MT) has been shown to be effective in treating people with post-stroke aphasia for mapping thematic roles to sentence structures in comprehension (Schwartz et al., 1994) and production (Rochon et al., 2005). However, little studies have investigated treatment of Chinese aphasia using MT. The current study adopted the Chinese MT for rehabilitation of post-stroke nonfluent and fluent aphasia. Methods Eleven Mandarin-speaking individuals with post-stroke aphasia (5 Broca’s, 3 Wernicke’s, 2 anomia, 1 conduction; 9 males/2 females; mean ages=58.27 years, ranging from 30 to 92 ages; mean education =13.36 years; mean symptom duration=3.38 months; mean AQ=53.73; mean CQ=58.71) participated in this study. During the treatment, the therapist trained the patient to identify the participants in the event/action in the simple sentence structures, and then followed with more complex sentence structures. Pictures of high-frequency objects in daily life were used as stimuli to construct simple sentences and more complex sentences. The therapist presented a couple of object pictures (e.g., turtle and carrot) and told the patient to “touch” one picture with another, or to “put” one picture on one side of another. Complexity of sentence structures incremented with more pictures (i.e., arguments in the sentence) and syntactic movement (i.e., Chinese passive bei sentences and disposal ba sentences). The patients were instructed to repeat the sentence they heard for several times while doing the “touching” or “putting” action. The mean treatment duration was 4.70 weeks (ranging from 2 to 12.86 weeks) with a 20-minnute session per weekday. The Chinese Western Aphasia Battery (C-WAB) was administered at the beginning and end of the treatment for assessment. Results Comparisons of the two tests from the C-WAB showed that all participants were significantly rehabilitated as suggested by the WAB AQ (p=0.003), CQ (p=0.012), degree of severity (p<0.001), and fluency (p=0.005). Their production ability was also significantly improved as shown by spontaneous speech (p=0.001), sentence completion (p=0.033), and reaction naming (p=0.016), but not for repetition (p=0.258). Additionally, their overall naming (p=0.058) and word fluency (p=0.060) were marginally improved. Further, their performance in sequential commands for the comprehension task was significantly improved (p=0.046), although not for overall auditory comprehension (p=0.072). Strikingly, our 92-year-old conduction patient, an academician with 22 years of education, was significantly recovered in speech after 4.14 weeks of intensive MT treatment. Conclusions These data add to the growing body of knowledge concerning the rehabilitation of the language deficits across different subtypes of aphasia and across different life span. Our study provides evidence suggesting that intensive treatment using Chinese MT can improve speech for Chinese-speaking people with post-stroke fluent and nonfluent aphasia.
Topic Areas: Language Therapy, Syntax