Case Study
Moderate Broca's Aphasia (brain injury)
Age: 27
Time since brain injury: 3 years
Problems
Kay sustained a severe traumatic brain injury and stroke from a motor vehicle accident. She was almost done with college and wanted to start a career.Kay’s stroke and TBI left her with significant difficulty speaking in sentences, using correct verb tenses, and word-finding. She knew when she was having trouble, but did not have good strategies to help herself.
Assessment
Using The Aphasia Center's testing protocols
- Relatively good comprehension in context
- Sentence-level reading
- Good awareness of deficits and breakdowns
- Difficulty finding specific words in conversation
- Limited ability to write single words
- Speech was mostly single nouns
Treatment
She completed a 8-week program with tDCS
and My Aphasia Coach software homework daily.
Results
Before
After
Speech Fluency
50%
90%
Repetition
54%
77%
Writing
13%
51%
Outcome
- Learned a wider variety of strategies to help during breakdowns
- Began speaking in grammatical sentences of 4+ words independently
- Learned how to use her phone as a strategy
- Self-correcting errors in verb tense and grammatical structure
- Improved ability to accurately write longer words and sentences