Effect of Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST) in Persons With Aphasia

Purpose Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST) is an aphasia treatment that targets verbs (e.g., measure) and their related thematic roles (e.g., carpenter–lumber). Previous studies reported encouraging results in a number of participants using single-subject design with improvements observed on naming, sentence production, and discourse. The purpose of the current study was to conduct a group analysis evaluating the effect of VNeST on similar outcomes.

Method A multiple baseline design across participants was conducted with 11 persons with aphasia due to stroke. Wilcoxon signed-ranks tests were used to evaluate potential improvement from pre- to posttreatment and maintenance. Individual effect sizes were also calculated to evaluate magnitude of change within and across participants.

Results Results showed significant improvement at posttreatment and maintenance on trained and untrained sentence probes and object and action naming. Improvement in the production of sentences not targeted in treatment was nonsignificant at posttreatment assessment but significant at maintenance. Moderate increases in percentage of complete utterances and overall informativeness were observed on discourse.

Conclusion The results of this study replicate previous findings and provide evidence that VNeST may promote specific and generalized lexical retrieval abilities and affect basic syntax production in both constrained and discourse production tasks.

目的动词网络强化治疗（VNeST）是一种针对动词（例如，测量）及其相关主题角色（例如，木匠-木材）的失语症治疗方法。既往研究报道，在采用单一受试者设计的情况下，多个受试者在使用VNeST治疗后，在命名、句子产出和话语方面均观察到显著改善。当前研究的目的是进行团体分析，评估VNeST对类似结果的影响。

方法：本研究对11名因中风导致的失语症患者采用多基线设计。使用Wilcoxon符号秩检验评估了从治疗前到治疗后的潜在改善以及维持情况。还计算了个体效应量，以评估受试者间和个体内的变化幅度。

结果：结果显示，在治疗后和维持阶段，在训练和未训练的句子探测以及物体和动作命名方面均观察到显著改善。在治疗后评估中，未在治疗中针对的句子产出改善非显著，但在维持阶段显著。在话语方面，完整语句的百分比和整体信息性均有适度提升。

结论：本研究的结果与先前发现一致，并为VNeST可能促进特定和一般化的词汇检索能力，并影响受限和话语产出任务中的基本句法产出提供了证据。