THE AUDITORY LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION PROGRAM - A DESCRIPTION AND CASE-STUDY

The Auditory Language Comprehension Programme is a Dutch therapy progr amme at the word level, especially developed for severely aphasic pati ents. The programme consists of 420 items divided over three parts. Ea ch item consists of a larger word and three distractors. One spoken ta rget word at a time is presented to the patient who has to choose one out of four pictures. The number of related distractors is varied: eac h part starts with items in which the distractors bear no resemblance to the target; later on, one, two and then all three distractors are r elated to the target. The nature of relatedness is dependent on the di fferent levels in the programme. In part 1, the phonological level, th ere is a correspondence in sound; in part 2, the semantic level, a cor respondence in meaning; in part 3, the complement, there is a phonolog ical correspondence, a combination of phonological and semantic corres pondence, or a lexical-morphological correspondence. The levels are hi erarchically built, according to the principles of programmed instruct ion. In order to show how a therapist may apply this programme, a case study is presented. The patient, who developed aphasia after traumati c brain injury, was trained on the semantic level. Both his performanc e and our therapy methods will be described and evaluated.