Professor Rosemary Varley at the ASLTIP “Therapy Talks” event (31/03/2022)
The UTILISE team are very grateful to the Association of Speech and Language Therapists in Independent Practice (ASLTIP) group for having us at their Therapy Talks event last week!
Professor Rosemary Varley, principal investigator of the UTILISE project, delivered a talk titled: “What’s new in sentence therapy for aphasia? “I don’t know””.
She gave a whistle-stop introduction to construction grammar, and spoke of how this theory informs our novel behavioural intervention targeting sentence rehabilitation in post-stroke aphasia.
Construction grammar suggests that we are able to store and access groups of words as single units, particularly if these phrases or sentences are “high frequency” (used often), for example: “I don’t know”.
This explains how someone with severe agrammatic expressive aphasia may be still be able to produce some grammatically correct utterances amidst otherwise syntactically disordered speech.
Using this idea of frequency, we are hoping to improve the accessibility and flexibility of these chunks in post-stroke aphasia.
“What’s new in sentence therapy for aphasia? “I don’t know””
Dr Anna Volkmer at the ASLTIP “Therapy Talks” event (31/03/2022)
Our UCL colleague, Dr Anna Volkmer, also delivered a terrific, and topical, presentation about Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA), which is a language-led dementia, called: ““Will you still need me when I’m 65?” Dementia, language and speech and language therapy interventions”.
Anna raised the importance of taking a bespoke, person-centred approach to speech and language therapy.
For more of Anna’s work, see her recently published article: “Principles and philosophies for speech and language therapists working with people with primary progressive aphasia: an international expert consensus”.