Analysis of Errors Following SCVTr Treatment: An Indicator for Improved Lexical Retrieval Abilities in Persons with Aphasia

Abstract

Purpose: Error analysis technique aids in understanding the psycholinguistic mechanisms associated with word retrieval. In addition to the linguistic test scores, if authors document the change in errors following treatment it may give better insight into the prognosis of PWAs. Despite the significance of error analysis, most of the study results elucidate the improvement merely in assessing the accuracy of naming skills. Thus, the present study was designed to assess the error patterns following treatment.Methods: A total of 11 PWAs (fluent and non-fluent aphasia) were enrolled for the study, these participant’s average age was 38.72 years (Range=24-64, SD=11.97). SCVTr treatment was rendered; in this treatment, PWAs were presented with 10 targeted verbs with a range of minimal (broad cues) and maximal cues (narrower cues) based on the success of the retrieval minimal to maximal cues were presented. The verbatim of trained and untrained stimuli (probes) of pre-treatment phase, post-treatment phase, and follow-up phase were subjected to error analysis using Edmonds and Babb (2011) protocol.Conclusions: The error patterns of individual participants across pre and post-treatment phases showed alleviated scores in the post-treatment phase among all the participants. Furthermore, all the participants exhibited almost identical error score patterns in the follow-up phase as in the post-treatment phase. The error analysis technique is the most powerful tool to track the changes at the psycholinguistic level.