Treatment effects: Regular use of SentenceShaper can improve spontaneous speech

Below is a brief summary of research studies about SentenceShaper as a language therapy tool, conducted at two sites: the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD, and Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute in Philadelphia, PA. More information about these research studies and the scientists and clinicians involved may be found on the grants page; full references to articles cited below are on the publications page. This page is derived from our Research Report; right-click here to download the entire report, then choose "Save target as..." (The report is in PDF format.) You may also wish to read the page describing research on the effectiveness of SentenceShaper as a communication aid.

Also, research is ongoing. People with aphasia in the Philadelphia and Baltimore areas are encouraged to contact us regarding being subjects in our aphasia research. The link takes you to a page with more information.

SentenceShaper treatment studies at Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute

The first study to show an impact of SentenceShaper use on spontaneous, unaided speech was reported in Linebarger, Schwartz, & Kohn (2001). Two people with nonfluent aphasia participated in an extended treatment program in which the system was used alternately with (but not at the same time as) another language therapy program. As indicated in Linebarger et al. (2001: Tables 7 and 9), the first fifteen hours of home use of SentenceShaper (after several hours of training in the lab) impacted various discourse measures of these individuals' unaided retellings of silent videos viewed before and after (but not during) training. For example, both participants showed changes in Median Length of Utterance (Participant 1: 2 pre, 4 post; Participant 2: 3 pre, 5 post) and Mean Sentence Length (Participant 1: 3.7 pre, 5.1 post; Participant 2: 6.4 pre, 7.7 post). These gains are particularly encouraging because they were achieved through largely independent home use of the system.

In a subsequent project, SentenceShaper was used in the context of aphasia groups. In this project, participants met weekly in supported conversation groups and also underwent weekly training on the system, which was used for two "offline" functional purposes: email (productions on the system were emailed to friends and fellow group members as sound file attachments) and a group web site (photographs and other images were accompanied by spoken comments created on the system).

In the second half of the study, participants were instructed to engage in regular homework constructing narratives on SentenceShaper. For six of the 10 participants in this phase of the study, impressive treatment gains were observed (Schwartz, Linebarger, Brooks, & Bartlett, in preparation). As reported in Linebarger & Schwartz (2005: Table 1), these gains were observed across a variety of unpracticed narrative tasks, ranging from Cinderella story retellings to the less demanding task of describing wordless picture books; and across a number of structural measures. For example, looking at Median Length of Utterance, Participant S8 showed gains in both the Cinderella narrative (MLU of 1 pre increasing to 3 post) and the wordless picture book description (2 pre, 6 post), as did Participant S11 (Cinderella: MLU of 2 pre increasing to 3 post; wordless picture book:2.5 pre, 5 post).

SentenceShaper treatment studies at the University of Maryland School of Medicine

Strong gains from SentenceShaper use were reported for one of the two participants in Linebarger, McCall, & Berndt (2004). In a currently funded study (Linebarger, McCall, Virata, & Berndt, submitted; McCall, Virata, Linebarger, & Berndt, in preparation), eight additional people with aphasia have been studied:

• Six of the eight participants have shown significant improvements in some syntactic aspects of production including Mean Sentence Length and Proportion of Words in Sentences.
• Three participants made significant improvements in the proportion of total words produced that were accurate, relevant, and informative.
• Five participants made rate improvements (words per minute).

The following table from McCall et al. (in preparation) shows the impact of SentenceShaper (SSR) training on the proportion of words that occur in sentences in these eight participants' retellings of a silent video narrative. Proportion of Words in Sentences is a key measure of syntactic structure, since it represents the difference between isolated fragments and full sentences. Six participants made significant gains on this measure; the two who did not were in normal range at baseline (as indicated by shading).

Proportion of Words in Sentences before and after Period of SentenceShaper Use