Model-guided treatment to improve written sentence production: A case study

Abstract

Abstract Impaired production of both spoken and written sentences was studied in a case of chronic aphasia. Assessment of the production impairment, guided by reference to a model of the processes normally involved in the production of spoken sentences, revealed two specific points of disturbance: (1) poor retrieval of lexical main verbs and (2) poor production of the morphological elements linked to verbs. Two interventions were targeted at the early stages of sentence construction and limited to practice in the written modality. Generalization of treatment-induced processing changes in spoken sentence production is discussed in support of the hypothesis that the intervention tasks isolated pre-phonetic and pre-articulatory aspects of sentence production. Expansion of the model of normal, spoken sentence production is proposed in order to accommodate details regarding the nature of processing requirements in written sentence production.