What makes a therapy? Some parameters of therapeutic intervention in aphasia

Abstract

It has often been assumed that detailed analyses of aphasic impairments would be both necessary and sufficient for the development of remediation programmes. In this paper, we argue that the analysis of the impairment is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for therapy. Adequate remediation programmes require the development of an independent theory of therapy that provides a detailed specification of the different components of the therapeutic process. Therapy can be shown to have as many interacting components as the impairment itself. In this paper, we try to identify some of the components of the therapy process by comparing different therapy programmes that have been employed in the remediation of 'mapping deficits' in agrammatism.