exical connectivity in aphasia: An investigation of word finding difficulties through age of acquisition, WordNet and Zipf*s law during recovery

Completed

Conditions: verworven taalstoornis
aphasia
language disorder due to brain damage
10007963

Registration Number: NL-OMON39046

Lead Sponsor: niversiteit Utrecht

Brief Summary: Not available

Detailed Description: Not available

Recruitment & Eligibility

Status: Completed

Sex: Not specified

Target Recruitment: 30

Inclusion Criteria

People with non-fluent aphasia
A) A stroke in the left hemisphere
B) Patients who - as a result of their stroke - suffer from non-fluent aphasia (as diagnosed by their local speech therapist)
C) Between 7 and 9 weeks post onset
D) Between 18 and 70 years old and mentally competent
E) Normal or corrected-to-normal hearing
F) Native speakers of Dutch
G) Right handed
H) Able to produce a sufficient amount of spontaneous speech, as estimated by their local speech therapist

Healthy controls
A) Healthy men and women
B) Between 18 and 70 years old, matched to the aphasic participants on age (+/- 5 years), sex, region and level of education
C) Normal or corrected-to-normal hearing
D) Native speakers of Dutch
E) Right handed

Exclusion Criteria

People with aphasia
A) Known language or speech impairments before the acquired brain damage
B) Serious attention deficits
C) Neclect, hemianopsia or other cortical visual problems
D) Global or fluent aphasia
E) Verbal dyspraxia;Healthy controls
A) A history of language or speech disorder
B) Neurological impairments

Study & Design

Study Type: Observational non invasive

Study Design: Not specified

Primary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
<p>The study parameters per testing moment and per participant are the parameters<br /><br>of the word frequency distribution; the parameters of the AoA distribution; and<br /><br>the parameters of the distribution of number of WordNet-connections. Combined,<br /><br>these parameters will provide a good estimate of the number of lexical<br /><br>connections per word. </p><br>

Secondary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
<p>The second objective of this study is to predict differences in score on (part<br /><br>of) the AAT between early and later stages of aphasia on the basis of the<br /><br>parameters that are examined as a first objective. The secundary study<br /><br>parameters are thus identical to the primary study parameters. </p><br>