Date of Award
1-1-2024
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
M.S. in Communication Sciences and Disorders
First Advisor
Hyejin Park
Second Advisor
Gregory J. Snyder
Third Advisor
Myriam Kornisch
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Abstract
Purpose
Individuals with aphasia often experience communication breakdowns. One strategy that has been shown to be useful is switching communication modalities when a breakdown occurs. While many researchers have incorporated and shown positive effects of multimodality in aphasia treatment, few studies have utilized a discourse task to generalize the methods trained during the structured tasks to everyday life. The purpose of Multimodal Communication Treatment + Discourse and Group (MCT+DG) is to train various communication modalities in both structured and unstructured settings, which include a discourse and group therapy to help generalizing the skills in daily communication.
Method
Two participants with aphasia participated in thirty total treatment sessions which included two individual sessions and one group session per week. During each session, the participants would practice five communication modalities (writing, drawing, gesturing, verbalizing, and using a communication book) in a structured task (referential communication) and a training (modality production task). Each participant also participated in an unstructured discourse task in which they generated a story of a picture scene. We obtained data from pretreatment, post-treatment, and follow-up sessions to measure the percentage of initial response and repair response accuracy to calculate the total effect size of the treatment.
Results
Neither of the participants showed a significant increase in percentages of initial or repair response accuracy at the word or discourse levels. However, a visual inspection of each participant’s graphs of initial and repair response accuracy suggested positive evidence of treatment effects.
Conclusion
While the experiment is lacking statistical support, it provided some evidence and potential of patient’s increased ability to utilize multiple communication modalities to help solve their communication breakdowns. We suggested several issues that affected the treatment effects such as ceiling effects, intervention intensity, and internal emotions of the participants. Future research may consider addressing the issues to maximize treatment effects. Also, a larger sample size and using other therapy flatforms (e.g., Telepractice) can be considered for future directions.
Recommended Citation
Peeler, Elizabeth Grace, "The Effects of Multimodal Communication with Discourse in People with Chronic Aphasia" (2024). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2859.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/2859