A longitudinal study of an adult with aphasia: Considerations for research and therapy

This paper described investigation and therapy carried out over a one year period with an adult aphasic patient characterized by severe impairment of auditory comprehension. A deblocking technique was used to reintegrate the mechanisms for correlating sound and meaning. The visual mode of presentation of linguistic material was used both to provide a stable representation of speech units and to allow reinforcement of auditory representations. The patient was given tasks of repetition, reading aloud, and sequencing, using progressively more complex material. The behavior of the patient gives support to the viability of the theoretical constructs of linguistics: this can be seen in the differential processing of function words vs. content words, and in the orderly progression of improvement through stages explicable as the recovery of well-defined and hierarchically dependent subcomponents of linguistic organization.