Training phoneme to grapheme conversion for patients with written and oral production deficits: A model‐based approach

Abstract

Background: A previous study (Kiran, Thompson, & Hashimoto, 2001) investigated the effect of training sublexical conversion on improving oral reading of regular words in two individuals with aphasia. Results revealed that training grapheme to phoneme conversion improved acquisition of trained items and facilitated generalisation to trained and untrained stimuli during oral naming, written naming, and writing to dictation as well. Aims: The aim of the present study was to extend this work to investigate if training phoneme to grapheme conversion would result in improvement of writing to dictation of trained items and facilitate generalisation to untrained stimuli and untrained tasks. Methods & procedures: Using a single subject experimental design across three participants with aphasia, the effects of phoneme to grapheme conversion treatment were evaluated by periodic probing of both trained and untrained regular words across lexical tasks: writing to dictation, written naming, oral spelling, and oral naming. Outcomes & Results: Results indicated that training phoneme to grapheme conversion resulted in improved writing to dictation of trained and untrained words in two out of three patients. In addition, improved written naming and oral spelling of trained words was observed. Marginal improvements were observed for untrained stimuli on written naming, oral spelling, and oral naming. Conclusions: The results of this experiment demonstrate the effectiveness of training sublexical conversion to improve written production deficits and to facilitate generalisation to untrained stimuli and untrained tasks. These results also complement findings of our previous study to suggest a more efficient method of improving single word production deficits than training each modality successively.