Faculty Bibliography

The purpose of this article is to provide speech-language pathologists with information about aphasia community group outcomes, with a focus on quality of life (QoL) factors. This article will also describe the social model of aphasia treatment as it relates to QoL and discuss the ways in which QoL may affect clinical outcome. The authors will also summarize predictive factors of QoL in people with post-stroke aphasia and briefly describe the assessment scales used to measure health-related QoL in communicative disorders. Participation in aphasia community groups helps to resolve the common complaint of social isolation and help improve psychological well-being through social interaction. It seems that improving quality of life in people with aphasia significantly depends upon building a stable and long-term social support network

The article examines the conventional strategies that enhance communicative effectiveness for a subject with dementia. Topics discussed include the types of conversational question types that would best facilitate language response in the subject, the effectiveness of different question types from the interviewer in promoting responses in the conversational partner that were coherent and accurate, and the accuracy of the responses to different question types

Background: Cognitive and language processes in dementia have been studied extensively, but motor speech degeneration in the course of dementing illness has been relatively unexplored. The potential for early dissociation of motor functions of language at the level of speech production has not been explored extensively in the research literature. Case presentation: In an earlier pilot study of temporal structure in the speech of persons with dementia, in which our participants produced a series of short phrases that included a target word beginning with a fricative or voiced or voiceless stop consonant and ending with either /t/ or /d/, this subject demonstrated inconsistent final lengthening and effects of final consonant voicing on vowel duration, as well as a voice onset time (VOT) pattern that suggested a reduced distinction between American English /b/ and /p/. Analysis of recordings of this subject made six months later revealed a number of additional changes in sentence- and phrase-timing patterns, changes that were not observed in the earlier recording. Conclusions: An interaction between motor speech and language production and perception changes such as that found in this case study informs our understanding of the deterioration in dementia