Award Title: Innovating remote self-delivered sentence therapy for post-stroke aphasia to enhance everyday conversations
Funder: Stroke Association

Abstract: Innovating remote self-delivered sentence therapy for post-stroke aphasia to enhance everyday conversations People with aphasia and their communication partners experience difficulty in everyday conversations, which negatively impacts social relationships and wellbeing. There has been significant progress regarding wordlevel therapies, but less progress in establishing effective therapies for sentence processing. Usage-based Construction Grammar, a new theory of sentence processing, suggests a greater role for stored syntactic frames. It emphasises factors such as frequency and integrates sentence structure with meaning and use, making it valuable in designing therapies. My PhD joins the UTILISE project, currently funded by a Stroke Association project grant. UTILISE therapy applies Construction Grammar principles by stimulating high frequency sentence frames, then introducing new lexical content to allow greater creativity. The existing project examined lab-based intervention which represents relatively low-dose treatment. I plan to evaluate a new version of the intervention which facilitates higher therapy dose by remote, self-delivery of UTILISE software. In the novel following phases, I will examine the impact of therapy order by comparing outcomes of UTILISE therapy followed by word naming therapy with the reverse order. I will gain the views of participants and family members regarding remote therapy and factors influencing self-delivered treatment dose. Finally, I will analyse whether outcomes generalise to participants’ everyday conversations.

Lay Abstract: Innovating remote self-delivered sentence therapy for post-stroke aphasia to enhance everyday conversations People with aphasia and their communication partners experience difficulty in everyday conversations, which negatively impacts social relationships and wellbeing. There has been significant progress regarding wordlevel therapies, but less progress in establishing effective therapies for sentence processing. Usage-based Construction Grammar, a new theory of sentence processing, suggests a greater role for stored syntactic frames. It emphasises factors such as frequency and integrates sentence structure with meaning and use, making it valuable in designing therapies. My PhD joins the UTILISE project, currently funded by a Stroke Association project grant. UTILISE therapy applies Construction Grammar principles by stimulating high frequency sentence frames, then introducing new lexical content to allow greater creativity. The existing project examined lab-based intervention which represents relatively low-dose treatment. I plan to evaluate a new version of the intervention which facilitates higher therapy dose by remote, self-delivery of UTILISE software. In the novel following phases, I will examine the impact of therapy order by comparing outcomes of UTILISE therapy followed by word naming therapy with the reverse order. I will gain the views of participants and family members regarding remote therapy and factors influencing self-delivered treatment dose. Finally, I will analyse whether outcomes generalise to participants’ everyday conversations.

Research Activity Codes: 6.6 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND BEHAVIOURAL
Health Categories: STROKE