THE EFFICACY OF COMPUTER-PROVIDED READING TREATMENT FOR CHRONIC APHASIC ADULTS

We examined the effects of computer-provided reading activities on lan guage performance in chronic aphasic patients. Fifty-five aphasic adul ts were assigned randomly to one of three conditions: computer reading treatment, computer stimulation, or no treatment. Subjects in the com puter groups used computers 3 hours each week for 26 weeks. Computer r eading treatment software consisted of visual matching and reading com prehension tasks. Computer stimulation software consisted of nonverbal games and cognitive rehabilitation tasks. Language measures were admi nistered to all subjects at entry and after 3 and 6 months. Significan t improvement over the 26 weeks occurred on five language measures for the computer reading treatment group, on one language measure for the computer stimulation group, and on none of the language measures for the non-treatment group. The computer reading treatment group displaye d significantly more improvement on the Porch Index of Communicative A bility ''Overall'' and ''Verbal'' modality percentiles and on the West ern Aphasia Battery Aphasia ''Quotient'' and ''Repetition'' subtest th an the other two groups. The results suggest that (a) computerized rea ding treatment can be administered with minimal assistance from a clin ician, (b) improvement on the computerized reading treatment tasks gen eralized to non-computer language performance, (c) improvement resulte d from the language content of the software and not stimulation provid ed by a computer, and (d) the computerized reading treatment we provid ed to chronic aphasic patients was efficacious.