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Semin Speech Lang 2020; 41(05): 365-382
DOI: 10.1055/s-0040-1712116
Review Article

Improving Discourse following Traumatic Brain Injury: A Tale of Two Treatments

Amy Henderson
1   Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina
,
Mackenzie A. Roeschlein
1   Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina
,
Heather Harris Wright
1   Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina
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Abstract

Persons with traumatic brain injury (TBI) often present with discourse-level deficits that affect functional communication. These deficits are not thought to be primarily linguistic in nature but instead are thought to arise from the interaction of linguistic and cognitive processes. Discourse processing treatment (DPT) is a discourse-based treatment protocol which targets discourse deficits frequently seen in TBI. Attention Process Training-2 (APT-2) is a published treatment protocol which targets four levels of attention. The purpose of this article is to investigate the effectiveness of DPT and APT-2 in improving discourse production and cognition in adults with TBI. Our results suggest that DPT results in greater improvement in discourse informativeness and coherence, but the combination of DPT and APT-2 resulted in greater generalization to untrained stimuli. Both DPT and APT-2 appear to have some potential to improve cognition, but there was intersubject variability with regard to which treatment is more effective.

Keywords

TBI - discourse - attention


Publication History

Article published online:
18 May 2020

Thieme Medical Publishers
333 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001, USA.

 

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