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“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.”
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