Script Templates: A Practical Approach to Script Training in Aphasia

Script training for aphasia involves repeated practice of relevant phrases and sentences that, when mastered, can potentially be used in other communicative situations. Although an increasingly popular approach, script development can be time-consuming. We provide a detailed summary of the evidence supporting this approach. We then describe a method in which scripts at various levels of difficulty are created by systematically manipulating readability and grammatical and semantic components. We assess the appropriateness of using these template-based scripts with persons with aphasia of differing severities.

We evaluated the oral reading performance of eight individuals with chronic non-fluent aphasia on scripts developed from the templates. Scripts were either of high or low difficulty relative to their aphasia severity, and personalized by inserting the participant's town and the name of an acquaintance. Oral reading probes were taken on three separate days within a week and performance within and across participants was examined.

Regardless of the participant's aphasia severity, scripts in the low-difficulty condition were read with significantly greater accuracy than scripts in the high-difficulty condition.

These findings support the use of graded script templates to ensure that appropriately challenging scripts are delivered to persons with aphasia for both clinical practice and research.