Clinical Trial: Effect of Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST) on Lexical Retrieval in Aphasia

Study Status: Completed
Recruit Status: Completed
Study Type: Interventional

Official Title: Effect Of Verb Network Strengthening Treatment on Lexical Retrieval in Aphasia

Brief Summary: The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effect of Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST) on the ability to produce sentences and connected speech in persons with aphasia.

Detailed Summary:

Stroke is the leading cause of disability in the United States today, and aphasia, a language disorder that affects production and comprehension of language, remains one of the most devastating aspects of stroke recovery. The most prominent symptom of aphasia is difficulty retrieving words, especially in sentence production and connected speech (e.g., telling a story, having a conversation). The current project examines the effect Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST), a language therapy, on the ability of persons with moderate aphasia to retrieve words in sentences and connected speech. The primary goals of VNeST are to 1) increase the specificity of nouns and verbs in sentences, 2) maximize improvement to untrained words across a variety of language tasks, and 3) engage and challenge participants with salient and relevant treatment materials and activities. Persons with aphasia who are enrolled in the study will receive VNeST for 10 weeks for 4 hours per week. Treatment tasks involve the retrieval of nouns related to a target verb. For example, for the verb measure, participants would come up with people who measure and what they measure (e.g., carpenter/lumber, chef/sugar). They would then answer questions related to why, where, and when these things might occur (e.g., for carpenter/measure, they might say "to get the right length of board," (why) "at a construction site," (where) and "when building a house" (where)). Cues and assistance are provided to the participants when they are unable to complete any given task. As the participants improve, cues are reduced.

Prior to treatment, testing will be conducted on participants to establish their abilities to retrieve words in the following contexts: 1) naming pictures of objects and actions, 2) sentences, and 3) connected speech.

Parti
Sponsor: VA Office of Research and Development

Current Primary Outcome:

• Trained Sentence Probe [ Time Frame: pre-treatment, post-treatment and 3-months post-treatment (maintenance) ]
  Picture description task that include trained words.
• Untrained Sentence Probes [ Time Frame: pre-treatment, post-treatment and 3-months post-treatment (maintenance) ]
  Picture description with sentences containing untrained words.
• Complete Utterances in Discourse [ Time Frame: pre-treatment, post-treatment and 3-months post-treatment (maintenance) ]
  Sentence in discourse that were relevant to topic and syntactically correct

Original Primary Outcome: Sentence probes using pictures to promote use of specific words [ Time Frame: Before study treatment, at each treatment session (20 over 10 weeks), at 3 months following completion of study treatment ]

Current Secondary Outcome:

• Noun Naming [ Time Frame: pre-treatment and post-treatment ]
  Confrontation naming of 162 objects
• Verb Naming [ Time Frame: pre-treatment and post-treatment ]
  Confrontation of 100 action pictures
• Western Aphasia Battery [ Time Frame: pre-treatment and post-treatment ]
  Standardized measure of aphasia severity
• Communicative Effectiveness Ratings [ Time Frame: pre-treatment, post-treatment and 3-months post-treatment (maintenance) ]
  This questionnaire (Lomas et al, 1989) was provided to persons who communicated with the treatment participant regularly (e.g., a spouse). They rated how well the participant was able to perform on 16 common communication tasks (e.g., participating in a conversation over coffee). They rated each scenario along a line that spanned between the two extremes of ability, from "not at all able" to "as able as before the stroke." The line was 100 mm. To score responses, the place where they bisected the line was measured. An average of their responses across the 16 questions was calculated.

Original Secondary Outcome:

Information By: VA Office of Research and Development

Dates:
Date Received: January 21, 2011
Date Started: March 2011
Date Completion:
Last Updated: June 5, 2015
Last Verified: June 2015