Attentive Reading and Constrained Summarization (ARCS) in two women with moderate-severe Wernicke’s Type Aphasia

Word-finding difficulty, a hallmark of aphasia, can substantially affect communication. Individuals with Wernicke’s type aphasia exhibit discourse characterized by word-retrieval impairments including neologisms and paraphasias (M. Nicholas, Obler, Albert, & Helm-Estabrooks, 1985; Silver & Halpern, 1992). Recently, evidence suggests that discourse level treatments improve word-retrieval processing in people with aphasia (for a review, see Boyle, 2011). The current feasibility study examined the use of a cognitive-linguistic discourse therapy, Attentive Reading and Constrained Summarization (ARCS) (Rogalski & Edmonds, 2008), as a means of improving word retrieval in two women with Wernicke’s type aphasia