Operant conditioning and errorless learning procedures in the treatment of chronic aphasia

Abstract

In the field of aphasia, the processes that enable improvements in fluent speech, e.g., in naming, reading, sentence structure, etc., are not well understood. At the present time the fields of cognitive psychology, clinical neuropsychology, and cognitive neuropsychology are limited with regard to explaining the causes of different symptoms of aphasia. Treatment based on operant conditioning or stimulus control procedures seems to be very promising. In the present study, four participants with chronic aphasia, aged between 52 and 62 years, received treatment based on errorless learning procedures and operant conditioning for 7 months. Treatment effects were evaluated with a multiple‐baseline design across behaviours. The performances that were treated varied across participants but were two or three of the following in each case: naming people or objects, making sentences, sequencing stimuli, discriminating written words, and unassisted recall. Treatment variables were clearly defined and systematically used in standard ways across participants with flexibility for adaptation to individual outcomes using clearly defined criteria. Prompts that were used in training faded out as performances improved. The performances of all participants improved significantly in all tasks; they all reached 100% correct performance without any prompts from the experimenter in at least one task. Generalization measures across stimuli and settings demonstrated that their improved performances generalized to novel stimuli and novel settings.