Background: Meaningful, varied, joyful conversation is an important therapy target for adults with language or cognitive-communication disorders following acquired brain injury (ABI). However, the complexity of daily communication is often reduced to component parts within intervention programmes, with mixed evidence of generalization to everyday…

Background: Despite evidence that Communication Partner Training (CPT) can enable health professionals to communicate more effectively with people with aphasia (PWA), an evidence-practice gap exists. To address this, a tailored implementation intervention was developed and trialled to improve health professionals' implementation of communication…

Background: Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) describes a group of language-led dementias. PPAs are complex, diverse and difficult to diagnose, and therefore conventional models of aphasia and dementia treatment do not meet their needs. The research evidence on intervention for PPA is developing, but to date there are only a few case studies…

Background: Communication between people with aphasia and their healthcare professionals (HCPs) can be greatly improved when HCPs are trained in using supportive conversation techniques and tools. Communication partner training (CPT) is an umbrella term that covers a range of interventions that train the conversation partners of people with…

Background: Many people with aphasia have word-finding difficulties, with some showing particular difficulties with verbs. Picture-naming therapy is often used to improve naming, but gains are usually limited to therapy items and do not transfer to conversation. Therapy where words are produced in sentences and in real-life activities may be more…

Background: Communication partner training (CPT) has been shown to improve the communicative environment of people with aphasia. Interaction-focused training is one type of training that provides an individualized intervention to participants. Although shown to be effective, outcomes have mostly been evaluated in non-experimental case studies.…

Background: Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) describes a heterogeneous group of language-led dementias. People with this type of dementia are increasingly being referred to speech and language therapy (SLT) services. Yet, there is a paucity of research evidence focusing on PPA interventions and little is known about SLT practice in terms of…

Background: Communication strategy training (CST) is a recognized part of UK speech and language therapists' (SLTs) role when working with a person with aphasia. Multiple CST interventions have been published but, to date, there are no published studies exploring clinical practice in this area. Aims: To investigate UK SLTs' current CST practices.…

Background: A communicative disability interferes with the affected person's ability to take active part in social interaction, but non-disabled communication partners may use different strategies to support communication. However, it is not known whether similar strategies can be used to compensate for different types of communicative…

Background: Previous studies of therapy for acquired anomia have treated nouns in isolation. The effect on nouns in connected speech remains unclear. In a recent study in 2012, we used a novel noun syntax therapy and found an increase in the number of determiner plus noun constructions in narrative after therapy. Aims: Two aims arose from the…

Background: Studies of therapy with people with aphasia tend to use impairment-based and functional measures of outcome. The views of participants are not formally evaluated. Current health and socialcare practice requires intervention to be explicitly client-centred and evidence-based. It is therefore important to investigate the broader effects…

Child-adult dialogues are important in an interactionist approach to acquisition of language behaviors because of the scaffolding provided by adults. Different forms of scaffolding used with children with and without language impairments are reviewed, and research on scaffolding with children aged 4-6 years is reported. Discourse strategies used…