Here is a video of a man who suffered from a stroke 8 years ago, and this is the progress that he has made since his stroke.

This is a video of a woman who suffers from aphasia, and how art is helping her recovery. I found this interesting because it is a unique approach for helping those who suffer from aphasia.

Bilinguals and Aphasia

This article is the most interesting article I found in doing my research. Along with Speech Pathology, I am also studying Spanish, so the issue of speech therapy and clients who are bilingual is a topic that I want to learn more about. In this article it states that there are 45,000 new cases of multilingual aphasia just in the United States. Because of the increasing number of multilingual people in the United States, there has been an increased need to find a way to help these clients. The recovery patterns of bilinguals have been studied, and while there are endless patterns that have been observed, there are six patterns that have been recognized. The six patterns are:

1. Parallel-both languages improve to a similar extent.
2. Differential-one language recovers better than the other
3. Selective-only one language recovers
4. Blended-inappropriate LM occurs
5. Successive-complete recovery of one language comes before the other
6. Antagonistic-the recovery of one language follows the opposite pattern of the other language

Singing and Aphasia

I found this article very interesting. It discussed how certain people suffering from aphasia are able to sing songs that are familiar to them, and how music can help in aphasia recovery. There were three experiments performed. In experiment one, each subject was asked to complete the words to familiar songs which they identified as having heard before prior to the experiment, both with and without the melodies. In experiment two, each subject listened to twenty unfamiliar songs with randomly assigned syntactic phrases and the subjects were asked to repeat the phrases with and without the melodies. In the third experiment, each subject listened to a simple melody. The melody was the combined with 32 excerpts from the unfamiliar songs in experiment two, then the excerpts were asked to be sung and spoken.

Results:

Experiment One:

The subject was able to recall 58.8% of the words while singing, and 30.5% of the words while speaking.

Experiment Two:

The subject was able to recall 8.3% of the words correctly with the melody, and 20% of the words without the melody.

Experiment Three:

The subject was able to recall the melody with 100% accuracy after hearing it played the first time. However, the subject was unable to recall any of the words with the melody, and while speaking the subject could produce 20% of the words.