Aphasia Therapy
aphasia
Participants received a total of 30 hr of therapy, dispersed over 6 weeks. All therapy tasks employed in the POLAR trial have been subjected to empirical testing in prior research. Two sets of 60 words were trained, one for phonological and one for semantic therapy. Both lists included 50 nouns and 10 verbs ranging from one to four syllables. The word lists were matched for linguistic complexity and word frequency. American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA)–certified speech-language pathologists (SLPs) with experience working with individuals with aphasia delivered all therapy tasks. Assessment and therapy fidelity was monitored by another ASHA-certified SLP to ensure consistency in therapy delivery among all SLPs (author L.A.S.; additional details provided in The phonologically focused therapy consisted of three therapy tasks: phonological components analysis (PCA; The semantically focused therapy similarly consisted of three tasks: semantic feature analysis (SFA; It is worth noting that although each therapy task has been shown to be effective on its own, the tasks have not been studied together to the authors' knowledge (e.g., SFA and VNeST). There are two main reasons for the choice to apply the tasks together as opposed to using a single task. First, we aimed to maximize semantic and phonological processing demands by applying a multifaceted therapy approach. Second, these tasks are rarely implemented in isolation across consecutive therapy sessions. Since the POLAR trial was designed to replicate clinical practice as well as reasonably possible, different tasks with the same focus were combined to approximate routine outpatient therapy procedures.