Development of a Free Online Interactive Naming Therapy for Bilingual Aphasia

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this ongoing project was to provide speech-language pathologists who serve culturally and linguistically diverse populations with a freely available online tool for naming therapy in a variety of languages. The purpose of this clinical focus article was to report on this resource in an effort to make known its existence, its instructions for use, and the evidence-based practices from which it was developed. Method The website, http://bilingualnamingtherapy.psu.edu/ , was created by the research team in collaboration with a web programmer using Amazon Web Services. The treatment protocol for the website was adapted from an evidence-based naming intervention in which clients select and verify appropriate semantic features for the target words. This protocol comes from the work of Kiran and colleagues ( Edmonds & Kiran, 2006 ; Kiran & Iakupova, 2011 ; Kiran & Lo, 2013 ; Kiran & Roberts, 2010 ; Kiran, Sandberg, Gray, Ascenso, & Kester, 2013 ; Krishnan, Tiwari, Kiran, & Chengappa, 2014 ), who showed positive benefits of this therapy within and across languages in bilingual persons with aphasia. The stimuli for the online therapy were developed in a variety of languages. First, words and semantic features were translated from English to 10 different languages. Next, surveys were created using Qualtrics software and posted on Amazon Mechanical Turk to verify picture labels and semantic features for each word in each language. The results of these surveys guided the stimuli used for each language on the website. An interactive website was developed to allow clinicians to select a set of words and progress through a series of steps. A step-by-step tutorial on how to use this website is also included in this article. Conclusions The interactive online naming therapy described in this article is currently available in English and Spanish, with Chinese under construction. Several more languages are in various stages of preparation for use on the website, and suggestions for additional languages are being actively sought. http://bilingualnamingtherapy.psu.edu/ promises to be a useful tool for speech-language pathologists who work with culturally and linguistically diverse clients. This website provides naming therapy materials, adapted from an evidence-based protocol, in a variety of languages, that have been developed based on feedback from speakers of each language to maximize cultural and linguistic appropriateness.