Use of the Story Retell Procedure as a Therapeutic Intervention in Aphasia

One goal of therapy for PWA is to improve everyday communication. To this end, therapies that focus on connected speech and elements of discourse can be useful. The objective of the present study was to determine whether the stories from the Story Retell Procedure-Brazilian Portuguese (SRP-BP), applied as a multimodal intervention, improve connected language production.

Eight individuals with chronic aphasia underwent a multimodal stimulation program using the SRP-BP as treatment stimuli. With specific tasks and feedback, participants listened, retold, read, and wrote each of the 12 SRP-BP stories on different days over a 12-week period. The percentage of words, information units, and propositions produced from each story were measured throughout the treatment period and compared across the 12 treatment sessions.

The results show that there was a statistically significant increase with a large effect size for the three measures over the 12 intervention sessions. The values of the non-standardized coefficients revealed an average increase of 2.57%, 0.97%, and 2.74% words, IUs, and propositions, respectively, at each treatment session. Comparing these measurements from the first to the final session, there was an average increase of 28.27%, 10.67%, and 30.14% words, IUs, and propositions, respectively.

This multimodal intervention, using the SRP-BP as treatment stimuli, yielded language improvement in connected speech for the group of eight PWA and for each of the participants in this study. Replication with a larger sample of PWA is needed and the active ingredients of this program need to be determined.