Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2022 Aug;32(7):1429-1455.
doi: 10.1080/09602011.2021.1895847. Epub 2021 Mar 14.

Training flexible conceptual retrieval in post-stroke aphasia

Sara Stampacchia  1   2 , Glyn P Hallam  1   3 , Hannah E Thompson  4 , Upasana Nathaniel  1   5 , Lucilla Lanzoni  1 , Jonathan Smallwood  1   6 , Matthew A Lambon Ralph  7 , Elizabeth Jefferies  1
Affiliations

Training flexible conceptual retrieval in post-stroke aphasia

Sara Stampacchia et al. Neuropsychol Rehabil. 2022 Aug.

Abstract

Semantic therapy in post-stroke aphasia typically focusses on strengthening links between conceptual representations and their lexical-articulatory forms to aid word retrieval. However, research has shown that semantic deficits in this group can affect both verbal and non-verbal tasks, particularly in patients with deregulated retrieval as opposed to degraded knowledge. This study, therefore, aimed to facilitate semantic cognition in a sample of such patients with post-stroke semantic aphasia (SA) by training the identification of both strong and weak semantic associations and providing explicit pictorial feedback that demonstrated both common and more unusual ways of linking concepts together. We assessed the effects of this training on (i) trained and untrained items; and (ii) trained and untrained tasks in eleven individuals with SA. In the training task, the SA group showed improvement with practice, particularly for trained items. A similar untrained task using pictorial stimuli (Camel and Cactus Test) also improved. Together, these results suggest that semantic training can be beneficial in patients with SA and may show some degree of generalization to untrained situations. Future research should seek to understand which patients are most likely to benefit from this type of training.

Keywords: Aphasia; cognitive control; executive; semantic; training.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of interest

The authors declare no competing interests or financial interests in this research.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Patients’ Lesion Overlay. Lesion overlay of the sample of SA patients included in the study. Patients’ brains compared to aged-matched controls. Grey matter, white matter and CSF were segmented and changes from the healthy control brains were highlighted as ‘lesion’ using automated methods (Seghier, Ramlackhansingh, Crinion, Leff, & Price, 2008). Colour bar indicates amount of overlap from 1 to 11 patients.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Schematic of study design. Trained trials were repeated in every training session, whereas novel trials were only presented once.
Figure 3
Figure 3. Schematic of training task
Figure 4
Figure 4
Training task, group level analysis: sessions by repetition (repeated, novel) by associative strength (strong, medium, weak). Error bars show SEM.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Training task, individual analysis: sessions (first vs. last) by repetition (repeated, novel). * = significant (p < .05) difference between conditions; ~* = difference between conditions approaching significance (p ≤ .07). Error bars show SEM.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Semantic associative task without feedback, group level analysis: session (pre vs. post) by training (trained, untrained) by associative strength (strong, medium, weak). Error bars show SEM.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Semantic associative task without feedback, individual analysis: session (pre vs. post) by training (trained, untrained). Error bars show SEM.
Figure 8
Figure 8
Accuracy in semantic control tasks. NT = not tested; * = significant (p < .05) improvement after training. Error bars show SEM.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Adlam A-LR, Patterson K, Bozeat S, Hodges JR. The Cambridge Semantic Memory Test Battery: Detection of semantic deficits in semantic dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Neurocase. 2010;16(3):193–207. doi: 10.1080/13554790903405693. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Badre D, Poldrack RA, Paré-Blagoev EJ, Insler RZ, Wagner AD. Dissociable Controlled Retrieval and Generalized Selection Mechanisms in Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex. Neuron. 2005;47(6):907–918. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2005.07.023. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Badre D, Wagner AD. Frontal lobe mechanisms that resolve proactive interference. Cerebral Cortex. 2005;15(12):2003–2012. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhi075. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Badre D, Wagner AD. Left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and the cognitive control of memory. Neuropsychologia. 2007;45(13):2883–2901. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2007.06.015. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Baldo JV, Paulraj SR, Curran BC, Dronkers NF. Impaired reasoning and problem-solving in individuals with language impairment due to aphasia or language delay. Frontiers in Psychology. 2015 OCT;6:1–14. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01523. - DOI - PMC - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources