Sentence Repetition Therapy. A Case Exploring the Relationship between Working Memory and Sentence Comprehension

Y. SEVILLA, V. JAICHENCO, A. OLMEDO, M. WILSON, M.E. SÁNCHEZ & A. FERRERES.

Buenos Aires

Congreso; INS-SONEPSA 2008 Mid-year Meeting; 2008

International Neuropsychological Society y Sociedad de Neuropsicología de Argentina

This study presents a case of an aphasic patient with mild language comprehension difficulties and verbal working memory deficit. Aiming at verifying whether an enhancement of her phonological storage abilities could benefit her sentence comprehension skills, a sentence repetition therapy was applied. Participants and Methods:on Francis, Clark & Humphrey (2003), a treatment was designed to improve the patients capacity to store phonological information by means of the repetition of sentences with increasing length but constant simple syntactic structure. The therapy programme lasted 7 weeks and involved an everyday practice at home and two monitoring sessions at the hospital facilities. Results : After therapy, the patient showed a significant improvement of her sentence repetition skills on treated and non-treated items. Other Working Memory measures ?digit span and reading span tasks- also showed considerable improvement evidencing the enhancing of her storage abilities. The therapy also benefited significantly her performance at sentence comprehension tasks.Conclusions : The program proved to be effective to rehabilitate the patients phonological storage abilities and led to subsequent improvement of her sentence comprehension skills. This contributes to clarify the relationship between working memory and sentence comprehension.