Open AccessEvaluating a Maintenance-Based Treatment Approach to Preventing Lexical Dropout in Progressive Anomia
Author(s) -
Maurice Flurie,
Molly Ungrady,
Jamie Reilly
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
journal of speech, language, and hearing research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.958
H-Index - 138
eISSN - 1558-9102
pISSN - 1092-4388
DOI - 10.1044/2020_jslhr-20-00059
Subject(s) - lexicon , psychology , aphasia , primary progressive aphasia , context (archaeology) , neuropsychology , set (abstract data type) , semantics (computer science) , spouse , cognitive psychology , vocabulary , audiology , cognition , developmental psychology , medicine , disease , dementia , psychiatry , linguistics , computer science , natural language processing , philosophy , pathology , frontotemporal dementia , biology , programming language , sociology , anthropology , paleontology
Purpose Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) and the amnestic variant of Alzheimer's disease (AD) are neurodegenerative conditions characterized by a profound loss of functional communication abilities. Communicative impairment in AD and PPA is especially apparent in the domain of naming common objects and familiar faces. We evaluated the effectiveness of a language intervention targeting maintenance of an individualized core vocabulary in a longitudinal cohort of older adults experiencing either PPA or AD. Method PPA ( n = 9) and AD ( n = 1) patients were administered a semantically based language treatment for up to 2 years. Patients repeatedly named and generated semantic features for a personalized lexicon consisting of 100 words. We evaluated naming accuracy and off-line neuropsychological measures at four successive timepoints. Naming accuracy was assessed in patients ( n = 7) who completed at least three recurrent evaluations. Off-line neuropsychological performance was assessed across timepoints in all patients. Results Patients demonstrated relative preservation of naming trained words relative to a steep decline for untrained (control) words. The greatest decrements were observed for naming people relative to objects. Conclusion These results suggest that consistent training of a finite set of words can protect a core lexicon composed of crucial target concepts (e.g., a spouse's name). We discuss potential benefits and clinical implications of maintenance-based approaches to promoting language functioning in the context of neurodegeneration.