Spelling intervention in post-stroke aphasia and primary
progressive aphasia
Issue title: Primary Progressive Aphasia and Post-Stroke
Aphasia: Some Complementary Insights into Brain-Behavior
Relationships/Hemispatial Neglect and Related Disorders
Affiliations: Departments of Neurology, Johns Hopkins Medicine,
Baltimore, MD, USA | Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Johns Hopkins
Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA | Department of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins
University, Baltimore, MD, USA
Note: [] Corresponding author: Kyrana Tsapkini, PhD, Department of
Neurology, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, 600 N. Wolfe Street, Meyer
6-113, Baltimore, MD 21237, USA. Tel.: +1 443 287 4518; Fax: +1 732 445 6715;
E-mail: tsapkini@jhmi.edu
Abstract: Spelling – a core language skill – is commonly affected
in neurological diseases such as stroke and Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA).
We present two case studies of the same spelling therapy (learning of
phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences with help from key words) in two
participants: one who had a stroke and one with PPA (logopenic variant). Our
study highlights similarities and differences in the time course of each
indivdual's therapy. The study evaluates the effectiveness and generalization
of treatment in each case, i.e. whether the treatment affected the trained
items and/or untrained items, and whether or not the treatment gains were
maintained after the end of therapy. Both participants were able to learn
associations between phonemes and graphemes as well as between phonemes and
words. Reliable generalization to untrained words was shown only for the
participant with post-stroke aphasia, but we were not able to test
generalization to untrained words in the individual with PPA. The same spelling
therapy followed a different time course in each case. The participant with
post-stroke aphasia showed a lasting effect of improved spelling, but we were
unable to assess maintenance of improvement in the participant with PPA. We
discuss these differences in light of the underlying nature of each
disease.
