How“Aphasia Is Different For Everybody.”

• APHASIA DEFINED -

• “Aphasia is different for everybody.” Ginny Anguish

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How To Make Each Therapy Activity Truly Therapeutic for Aphasia - 1

“Each of us has his or her own distinct personality.” Gladwell Outliers

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• Each of us has, “...tendencies and assumptions and reflexes handed down to us by the history of the community we grew up in, and these differences are extraordinarily specific.” Gladwell, Outliers

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• Make sure that metaphasia has been established so that the patient has clear insight into what needs to be done.

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• Work with sentences not individual words as often as possible even when working on morphological and phonological (speech sounds) elements of language.

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• Obtain lots and lots of self-generated patient neural flows - utterances and/or sentences.

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• Make sure the patient practices out loud, especially when he/she is alone.

• This may be the single most important element to ensure automatic carryover.

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• Combine angles (reading, writing, gesture, typing, pragmatics) as often as possible.  The Aphasia Sight Reader and Verbal Working Memory and Attention Training software programs used by subscribers to www.aphasiatoolbox.com  is an excellent tool for helping to accomplish this.

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• Have the patient create or at least be very involved in the design of his/her own materials/stimuli for practice.

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• Simultaneously build cognitive underpinnings for conversation such as verbal working memory, sustained and alternating attention skills, self awareness, and mental resource allocation.

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• When appropriate, provide quick, clean, diverse and descriptive feedback.

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• Get patient practicing independently for at least several hours everyday with coaching and independently.

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• Use complexity training.

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• Make sure that technology tools SEAR

• simple to use

• effective

• affordable

• responsive to patient change

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