NCT04708561

Therapy of Pragmatic Disorders in Brain-damaged Individuals

Therapy of Non-literal Language Comprehension Disorders in Brain-damaged Individuals: Case Studies

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 2 (actual)
• Sponsor: University of Neuchatel · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 20 Years – 65 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

This study aims to assess speech therapy's effectiveness in understanding other people's thoughts (implied) using written stories. The main objective is to examine whether the therapy improves understanding of the stories worked on in the sessions. We also explore whether the observed progress is maintained one month after the end of treatment and whether it is generalized to neuropsychological tests, video material, and the participants' daily lives. This therapy will be administered to four individuals with brain lesions, for six weeks, at the rate of two weekly sessions of one hour.

Conditions

• Brain Injuries, Traumatic
• Right Hemispheric Stroke

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Speech and language therapy	The intervention focuses on understanding the thoughts of the characters. Twenty written stories will be used, which end with statements that can be interpreted literally, ironically, as a lie, a request or a faux-pas (maladroitness). At the end of each story, the participant should explain what the characters want to mean by their statement. To help the participant in his understanding of the character's intention, he will be asked: 1\) To mention as many intentions as possible that can be associated with the target statement presented out of context (eg: "it's hot here" that can be interpreted literally, ironically, as a lie or a request) and to imagine contexts in connection with interpretation; 2. Analyze the relevant elements of the context (environment, the relationship between the characters, knowledge of the characters); 3. To judge the probability of the possible interpretations (pt 1) by justifying using the elements of the context analyzed previously (pt 2).

Timeline

• Start date: 2020-06-03
• Primary completion: 2021-10-31
• Completion: 2022-04-30
• First posted: 2021-01-14
• Last updated: 2022-05-18

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Switzerland