International journal of language & communication disorders
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Int J Lang Commun Disord · Sep 2013
Randomized Controlled TrialUsing computers to enable self-management of aphasia therapy exercises for word finding: the patient and carer perspective.
Speech and language therapy (SLT) for aphasia can be difficult to access in the later stages of stroke recovery, despite evidence of continued improvement with sufficient therapeutic intensity. Computerized aphasia therapy has been reported to be useful for independent language practice, providing new opportunities for continued rehabilitation. The success of this option depends on its acceptability to patients and carers. ⋯ Independent computerized aphasia therapy is acceptable to stroke survivors. Acceptability can be maximized by tailoring exercises to personal interests of the individual, ensuring access to support and giving consideration to fatigue and life style when recommending practice schedules.
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Int J Lang Commun Disord · Sep 2013
Clinical markers in Italian-speaking children with and without specific language impairment: a study of non-word and real word repetition as predictors of grammatical ability.
In many languages a weakness in non-word repetition serves as a useful clinical marker of specific language impairment (SLI) in children. However, recent work in Italian has shown that the repetition of real words may also have clinical utility. For young typically developing Italian children, real word repetition is more predictive of particular grammatical abilities than is non-word repetition. This finding is important because these particular grammatical abilities--the production of present-tense third-person plural inflections and direct-object clitic pronouns--are precisely those that are problematic for Italian-speaking children with SLI. Along with their grammatical requirements, these two morpheme types present a significant phonological/prosodic challenge for these children. ⋯ It is argued that in Italian SLI, the grammatical details showing the greatest weakness present phonological/prosodic obstacles as well as grammatical challenges to these children. Consequently, non-word repetition emerges as a predictor of these grammatical weaknesses in SLI, unlike the profile observed in typically developing Italian children.