Discussion
ExpG
The present study measured the effects of the Dr. NeuronowskiSeveral cognitive functions were exercised in the experimental training, with a particular emphasis on TIP, which resulted in the lowering of participants’ temporal order thresholds (TOT), enhancement of phoneme discrimination (i.e., increased number of correct responses on the Phoneme Hearing Test), as well as improved maintenance of verbal stimuli in short-term memory (i.e., higher score on the Verbal Memory Test Forwards) in the post-training assessment. This improvement of the directly-trained functions may be considered as near transfer—improvement in tasks structurally similar to those trainedHowever, as phoneme hearing is also heavily rooted in millisecond TIPOf particular interest is the improvement of the following linguistic functions in ExpG: sentence comprehension, grammar comprehension, fluency, and naming. Experimental training did not provide practice for those functions, which may suggest more complex mechanisms of transfer. PWA improved in the comprehension of longer language units, as evidenced in better performance on sentence comprehension and grammar comprehension in post-training vs pre-training assessment. Similar effects were reported by Szeląg et al.It is an important and novel finding of this study that the Dr. NeuronowskiThis improvement of untrained functions following the experimental training may indicate a far-transfer effect—that is, the transfer of training benefits to a different domain that shares underlying mental processes with the trained oneAfter the Dr. NeuronowskiIt is, however, worth noting that, despite the emphasis on TIP, particular modules of Dr. NeuronowskiIn contrast, the control training resulted in improvement of only grammar comprehension and naming, which were directly practised. No significant improvement was observed in several linguistic measures: sentence comprehension, verbal fluency, and phoneme discrimination. As previously noted, sentence comprehension (measured with the Token Test) requires non-linguistic functions (e.g., working memory, which was not trained in this group), and therefore simple practice in sentence comprehension may have been insufficient to improve performance in this test. Similarly, tasks that assess verbal fluency, involving spontaneous generation of words from specific semantic categories, engage verbal working memory and semantic control as well as auditory attention and processing speed, which were not trained in the control groupAccording to Abikoff and RamseyIt is worth mentioning that we expected more widespread linguistic improvement in the control group. However, we speculate that the standardising and adjusting of experimental settings for both trainings resulted in a reduction of patient–therapist communication that occurred, which is typically associated with traditional speech training. This may have also hindered the effectiveness of this trainingIt is important to note that unequal number of patients participated in the following assessments (pre- and post- vs follow-up) was the limitation of the current study. Consequently, the main analyses were conducted only on the post- vs pre-training assessments as the follow up assessment was completed by a smaller number of patients (see “In summary, the current results are in line with previous studies regarding the use of training of TIP alone in PWA