BACKGROUND: Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST) is a semantic treatment that aims to improve lexical retrieval of content words in sentence context by promoting systematic retrieval of verbs (e.g., measure) and their thematic roles (i.e., agent (doer of the action, e.g., carpenter, chef)) and patient (receiver of the action, e.g., lumber
Lumber
Lumber or timber is a type of wood that has been processed into beams and planks, a stage in the process of wood production. Lumber is mainly used for structural purposes but has many other uses as well.
Full Answer
What is verb network strengthening treatment (vnest)?
What is Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST)? Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST) is a therapy technique that focuses on verbs. It aims to improve word finding in order to produce sentences. Many people with aphasia struggle with creating complete sentences.
Do related words activate networks of verbs and associated participants?
In line with this, the treatment aims to activate networks of verbs and their associated participants, with the further hypothesis that related words, sharing members of the network, might also benefit. Evaluations of VNeST by Edmonds & Babb (2011) and Edmonds et al (2009; 2014a; 2014b) have supported this hypothesis.
How do I follow the vnest protocol for targetting verbs?
Therapy: To follow the VNeST protocol, spend approximately 45 minutes targetting verbs. Spend approximately 15 minutes on the carryover section. Targetting verbs: Explain to the client that you will be working on verbs. Go to the sentence frame board on the grass by the treehouse.
What are the appropriate verbs for therapy?
Here are a few guidelines for selecting appropriate verbs for this type of therapy: First, they need to be transitive verbs, in that they take an object. This means catch will work (“the dog catches the ball”), but arrive won’t (“the woman arrives”). Next, the verbs should be familiar, but not too generic.
What is verb network strengthening treatment?
Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST) is a therapy technique that focuses on verbs. It aims to improve word finding in order to produce sentences. Many people with aphasia struggle with creating complete sentences. In English, a typical sentence structure is formed by a subject-verb-object sequence.
How do you do visual action therapy?
The program starts out at a very basic level – using a finger to trace a drawing. It then works its way through steps like picture matching and understanding a gesture for an item that is present. The final step is to produce a gesture for an item that the participant cannot see.
What does VNeST stand for?
Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST) is a verb-centered treatment designed to promote generalization to noun and verb retrieval in single words, sentences and discourse.
What is Tactus Therapy?
Tactus Therapy isn't just one app – It's a collection of 20 apps that are each uniquely designed to work on a specific skill at various levels: Oral Language (verbalizing & listening) Written Language (reading & writing) Speech (making clear sounds when talking) Cognition (thinking skills like memory)
What is Action therapy in psychology?
any therapy that emphasizes doing and taking action rather than verbal communication or discussion.
Who created visual action therapy?
Visual action therapy (VAT) (Helm-Estabrooks, Fitzpatrick, and Barresi, 1982) is one such technique that was designed to train globally aphasic patients to produce symbolic gestures for visually absent stimuli.
What is Phonomotor treatment?
Phonomotor Treatment is an intensive treatment program designed to improve phonologic processes of PWA by training speech sounds in isolation before progressing to sound combinations and single words (Kendall et al., 2015).
What is TUF in aphasia?
Treatment of Underlying Forms (TUF) is a linguistically based therapy for improving sentence deficits in agrammatic aphasia. TUF focuses on non-canonical sentence structures and includes training for both sentence comprehension and production.
What is Schuell's stimulation approach?
Schuell's Stimulation Approach focuses on providing multimodal stimulation to rehabilitate an impaired language system through repetitive, intensive auditory stimulation to elicit a response from the PWA with a focus on using individualized and personally relevant stimuli to address the treatment goals of the ...
When is semantic feature analysis used?
Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA) is a therapy technique for aphasia that is used to improve naming abilities. Aphasia often impairs a person's ability to think of words easily. SFA has been shown to improve naming of items that are addressed in therapy.
Is TalkPath therapy free?
With TalkPath Therapy, users can practice language and cognitive skills for free with more than 13,500 scientifically designed tasks in eight areas: news, speaking, reading, writing, listening, memory, reasoning, and daily living.
What is a Tactus in music?
Tactus is the slow, steady beat that guides Early Music, shown by a down-up movement of the hand, approximately one second each way.
What is VNeST therapy?
This is known as generalization. To engage and challenge participants with interesting and meaningful treatment items. VNeST can be used with people with many types of aphasia. People will be most successful if they have basic comprehension.
Can a person with aphasia repeat one word of a sentence?
Some people will create the verb networks on their own with the SLP just providing verbs. Other times, the SLP will create the sentences and the person with aphasia can practice repeating or providing one word of the sentence. People with aphasia and their families can also practice this technique at home.
What is VNeST in psychology?
... VNeST is directly motivated by psycholinguistic work examining event representations (McRae & Matsuki, 2009): it stimulates and reinforces event-related representations comprising typical sets of agents, actions, themes, and locations (such as baker, measure, flour, kitchen). In a series of controlled, single-case-design treatment studies, VNeST has resulted in improved verb retrieval and sentence production (in particular, thematic role assignment in subject-verb-object sentences) in 19 English-speaking and 3 Korean-speaking PWA (Edmonds, 2016). VNeST also results in greater improvements for untrained verb and sentence stimuli than do verb-retrieval treatments that target only action semantics (e.g., Faroqi-Shah & Graham, 2011;Rose & Sussmilch, 2008) or grammatical features of verb representations (Schneider & Thompson, 2003). ...
What is a VNeST protocol?
The VNeST protocol aims to promote generalization to increased lexical retrieval of untrained words across a hierarchy of linguistic tasks, including single-word naming of nouns and verbs, sentence production, and discourse. The concept of the verb network relates to the centrality of the verb to the semantics and syntax of a sentence. The VNeST protocol elicits diverse agents (e.g., musician) and patients (e.g., tambourine) around trained verbs (e.g., shake) to activate a range of semantic concepts and personal responses to potentially facilitate generalization to a multitude of lexical items. The pre- and posttreatment generalization results for the 19 participants reported in English are analyzed. Participants represent a range of aphasia severities and types, including Broca's, transcortical motor, anomic, Wernicke's, and conduction aphasia. A previous study that evaluated 3 monolingual Korean speakers on a modified version of VNeST that accommodated Korean's verb final word order is also summarized. The findings across the 5 English studies and the Korean study revealed increased noun and verb naming and lexical retrieval in sentences and discourse on untrained items and tasks for more than half of the participants, suggesting preliminary efficacy for VNeST. Potential predictors and mechanisms of improvement are explored, and clinical implications, including consideration of goals, outcome measures, dosage, inclusion and evaluation of writing, and verb selection, are discussed.
How effective are phonological and orthographic cues in aphasia therapy?
Background: Phonological and orthographic cues can both be effective in the treatment of anomia, and are often used clinically. However, studies using phonological and orthographical cues in aphasia therapy have tended to be equivocal about their benefits, and most demonstrate improvements limited to treated items. Few previous studies investigate change in conversation or in people's own views of their aphasia.Aims: The aim of the study was to investigate the effect of a weekly delivered therapy, using combined phonological and orthographic cues, on word retrieval, connected speech, conversation, and on the participant's own views of his aphasia.Methods & Procedures: A person with anomia (TE) is presented as a detailed single-case study. Two baselines, 8 weeks apart, were followed by two 8-week phases of therapy, delivered weekly in a clinical setting. The first phase involved the use of combined phonological and orthographic cues to aid retrieval of a targeted set of words. The second phase encouraged the use of targeted words in connected speech and conversation. TE was reassessed after each phase of therapy and again 2 months later, after a period of no therapy. The study involved controls for improvement due to regular contact but without intervention (the baseline phase) and investigated generalisation to untreated items (treated and untreated sets were used, balanced for performance prior to therapy). Finally non-specific effects of therapy were determined by testing throughout the study on a set of language control tasks (predicted to be unaffected by the therapy).Outcome & Results: TE demonstrated significant and enduring improvements in picture naming, which had generalised to untreated items. Significant improvements were also demonstrated in the broader measures of connected speech, aspects of conversation, and his own views of his aphasia, while performance on control tasks remained fairly stable. There was a significant relationship between changes in word finding and changes in TE's views of his communication activity across the course of the study, with a pattern of stability over baseline and change with intervention, particularly the first phase of therapy, i.e., using cues.Conclusions: These findings demonstrate that a combined phonological and orthographic cueing therapy targeting word retrieval can have lasting benefits, not just on targeted items but also on untreated words, connected speech, and the views of the person with aphasia. Furthermore, such improvements can be achieved within a prevalent service delivery model.
Why is lexical retrieval important?
Consistent with these needs, lexical retrieval is selected for measurement because it is the hallmark symptom of aphasia and is integral for creating meaning in effective communication (Chafe, 1970). In addition, basic English sentence production is constructed around a simple canonical subject-verb- (object) structure (SV (O); Chafe, 1970; Edmonds, 2016; Loverso, Prescott, & Selinger, 1988), which is susceptible to disruption by aphasia. Impairment hitting at this foundational core of English is potentially quite detrimental; thus, SV (O) structure is a measure of importance for this research. ...
Is cross language generalisation used for aphasia?
Background: Cross-language generalisation has been reported in about half of all published cases of bilingual aphasia treatment. However, many of those studies report data from only single-word naming tasks. In unbalanced bilinguals with aphasia, treating the post-morbidly less proficient language may result in apparent improvement to only the treated language. Aims: To investigate whether when tools are used to measure language abilities beyond the single-word and sentence levels, such as analysing discourse production, improvement in the post-morbidly more proficient language may be observed. Methods & Procedures: A Hebrew-English bilingual person with mild-moderate non-fluent agrammatic aphasia was recruited. He received 36 h of Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST) in English only, with pre- and post- treatment assessment of his language abilities in both English and Hebrew. Outcome & Results: Significant improvement was observed in the treated language (English) for noun and verb retrieval in object and action picture naming and within sentence production, but not for the untreated language (Hebrew). In discourse, greater and more widespread improvement was observed in the untreated language (Hebrew) than in the treated language (English). Conclusions: We advocate for more wide-ranging measurement tools in the field to reduce the risk of missing valuable information regarding generalisation. Only with a more representative understanding of the effects of language treatment in bilinguals with aphasia can we better understand the mechanisms behind cross-language generalisation.
What is VNeST treatment?
This article examines Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST), a relatively new treatment approach for anomia in people with aphasia. The VNeST protocol aims to promote generalization to increased lexical retrieval of untrained words across a hierarchy of linguistic tasks, including single-word naming of nouns and verbs, sentence production, and discourse. The concept of the verb network relates to the centrality of the verb to the semantics and syntax of a sentence. The VNeST protocol… CONTINUE READING
What is the VNeST protocol?
The VNeST protocol aims to promote generalization to increased lexical retrieval of untrained words across a hierarchy of linguistic tasks, including single-word naming of nouns and verbs , sentence production, and discourse.
Generalization
3. answer where, why and when questions about a specific S-V-O sentence.
Goals of VNeST
1. Help PWA communicate more completely in words, sentences and discourse