Constraint-Induced Aphasia

Although language production and comprehension is associated with regions within the left hemisphere, it is possible for areas within the right hemisphere to compensate for language deficits in aphasic patients. In this study, the general question is whether or not activation in the right hemisphere is more likely with patients who have severe aphasia, as opposed to patients with mild aphasia who are able to recover by utilizing unaffected language areas or perilesional areas. The main hypothesis is that subjects with chronic non-fluent aphasia will recruit right-hemispheric areas to improve their language functions following two weeks of constraint-induced aphasia therapy. The independent variable is the aphasic experimental group compared to the control group, and the dependent variables are activation in the regions of interest and the behavioral improvements. In this study, the regions of interest were the inferior frontal gyrus …show more content…
During the reading condition and the completion task, several activation periods were established to gather data from the period of time the subjects were in the scanners. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data was collected from aphasic patients before the constraint-induced aphasia therapy and after. During the behavioral improvement evaluation, the experimental group was tested with the spontaneous speech test, Token Test, and auditory and semantic comprehensibility tests. They participated in these tests both before and after the therapy. The control group did not partake in this section of the study. Both the control group and the experimental aphasic group completed the simple reading task and the word stem completion task, but the experimental group completed it twice for comparison in before and after the