Browsing by Author "Jokinen, Milla"

Aims. One of the most common symptoms in aphasia is anomia, or word-finding difficulty. When retrieving words, that one has already learned causes a challenge, it is understandable that learning new ones can be difficult for people with aphasia. Studies have proven, though, that the ability to learn novel words doesn’t necessarily disappear in aphasia, but there is a wide individual variation in the learning ability. Because the ability to learn has been found to correlate with the response to therapy in aphasic individuals, researching learning and understanding it better is important from the clinical point of view. There are a lot of factors that affect learning, and modality could be one of them. In some previous studies, it has been noted that aphasic individuals were only able to learn novel words if they were in a written format. The aim of this study was to find out more about the effect of modality on learning novel words in chronic aphasia, and to compare the learning results of the aphasic individuals with those of healthy control participants. Methods. Two aphasic (AFA1 and AFA2) and two healthy control participants were recruited for this study. The learning experiment consisted of four learning conditions with different input-output modality combinations, meaning that the participants first either read or heard the words, and then either said them out loud or wrote them down. In each condition, there were 15 word-picture pairs to learn. The words were pseudowords and the pictures were black-and-white drawings of ancient farming equipment. Results and conclusions. The results of this study support the earlier results that suggest that even in chronic aphasia, learning novel words is still possible, but there is a lot of variation. In this experiment, AFA1 could learn words well, but AFA2 didn’t really learn them at all. Modality was found to be significant as well, since the learning results even for AFA1 were poor in two of the four learning conditions. Unlike in the previous studies, AFA1’s learning wasn’t dependent on reading the words but on writing them. Though her performance was most successful in the condition where the words were read and then written. In this condition, she learned all the 15 words and her learning was on the level of the healthy control participant. As of now, only few studies have been done on the effect of modality on learning in aphasia, but the results from this study and the previous ones encourage to do more research on this subject. Because a link has been found between learning ability and response to therapy, figuring out the best way to learn for each aphasic individual might also affect the treatment outcomes.