Linguistic-specific sentence production treatment for agrammatic aphasia

This article describes an approach to treatment of agrammatic aphasic individuals' sentence production deficits. In this linguistic-specific sentence production treatment, sentences selected for treatment and the treatment itself are controlled for their lexical and syntactic properties. Results derived from a series of studies using this approach have shown successful outcomes of treatment. Improved production of sentences targeted for training and generalization to untrained sentences that are linguistically similar to those trained have resulted from treatment. In addition, improvements in sentence production in discourse tasks have been noted. An overview of the theoretical foundation of linguistic-specific sentence production treatment, the results of our experiments investigating its efficacy, and clinical protocols is provided.