Elizabeth Rochon

Probing the mysteries of language

Cinderella may be a favourite fairy tale for children but the compelling plot and colourful characters are also helping researchers shed new light on language impairments.

Dr. Elizabeth Rochon, a Scientist at Toronto Rehab, and colleagues used the fairy tale when testing a new treatment they developed to enhance the speaking abilities of stroke patients with language difficulties.

“The patients who were treated did better after therapy on all of the sentence types, and also in terms of their ability to speak in sentences in retelling a fairy tale,” says Dr. Rochon, a speech-language pathologist.

For instance, when asked to retell the story of Cinderella, participants were able to produce descriptions like: “She had lost a glass slipper” and “the fairy godmother appeared because Cinderella was not happy.”

Through her research, Dr. Rochon seeks to understand the nature of language and communication problems in patients with neurological disorders, especially those with Alzheimer’s disease and stroke patients who have a language impairment called aphasia.

Aphasia takes many different forms. Some people have difficulty expressing themselves but can understand what is being said to them; others don’t seem to understand well but speak fluently.

There are so many mysteries surrounding language comprehension and production. Why are some people more impaired than others who have exactly the same brain injury? What kinds of therapies work best for what kinds of aphasia?

“There are still very basic things we don’t know about how the brain handles new information when it’s damaged,” says Dr. Rochon. “How does it relearn?”

Her new therapy for sentence production actually seeks to retrain what are thought to be the “underlying operations” used by the brain to produce a grammatically complex sentence.

In the groundbreaking study, participants were given therapy in the form of cues to train them to produce simple and complex sentences. To test the effects of this therapy, the researchers presented photos – showing doctors, lawyers, cashiers and other people – to the participants and cued them to produce sentences describing “who was doing what to whom.”

The results were impressive. Not only did participants receiving therapy do better on all sentence types, their “narrative speech” also showed improvements when they later retold the tale of Cinderella.

Significantly, the participants were “chronic” patients whose strokes had taken place between two and nine years earlier.

These findings suggest people can benefit from language therapy for some time after suffering a stroke, says Dr. Rochon.

Dr. Rochon is also working with Drs. Alex Mihailidis and Geoff Fernie to find ways to help people with language impairments due to Alzheimer’s disease to “compensate” for their difficulties. One study aims to identify the best kinds of verbal prompts for use in every day activities. The findings will be incorporated into a new system that uses artificial intelligence to guide people through the steps of hand washing and other daily activities.

Dr. Rochon was attracted to her field of research while doing clinical work for a Master’s in speech-language pathology. “I realized every patient I encountered was different and fascinating,” she says. “And there were many more questions than there were answers in terms of what we were doing with patients. I wanted to be involved in looking for some of those answers from a research point of view.”

She finds the work in this complex area deeply satisfying. “I feel like I’m uncovering pieces of a big puzzle along the way that can ultimately be helpful to people in their lives.”

Also rewarding, she says, is the opportunity to work with a multidisciplinary group. “We go places we could never have imagined by combining our expertise and different perspectives to focus on a research problem.”

Publications since 2000

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