Induced Aphasia Therapy Restriction: Design Single Subject in Conduction Aphasia

Introduction: Constraint-induced therapy in aphasia (cita) is a therapeutic method for functional recovery of expressive language in aphasia patients, whose effect has been found from experimental studies in countries as Germany and United States of America for more than one decade and it has been established in the practice of the speech- language therapist in Colombia. Objective: This research consists on a case study of conduction aphasia which estimates the effect of a protocol constraint-induced therapy on language performance. Materials and methods: The patient is a female 49 years with superior education level that has conduction aphasia results of stroke with two years of evolution; she received cita with an intensity of two hours per day, five days week, for four weeks. As part of the protocol of CITA, 40 different verbal stimuli were presented in five sessions (Set 1 and Set 2: verbs and nouns, Set 3: expressions and Set 4: antonyms) conforming 160 stimuli to strategies of stimulation and facilitation of oral language but using restriction of nonverbal forms of communication. Measurements were taken before and after the cita using standardized tests. Results: The pre and pos comparative performance tests indicate
an improvement in multiple domains of expressive language such as: verbal fluency related
to sentence length, grammatical melodic line and form, production of more complex syntactic structures, better employment of connectors, nouns, adjectives and verbs into the oral productions; and decreased neologisms, anomies, hesitations and interjections. The hypothesis is cita induces positive changes in the verbal performance of aphasia patients; however, it requires a sustained exposure over time to induce generalization of learning.