LAUSR

Purpose The purpose of this study was to examine the preliminary efficacy of Attentive Reading and Constrained Summarization-Written (ARCS-W) in people with mild aphasia. ARCS-W adapts an existing treatment, ARCS (Rogalski & Edmonds, 2008), to address discourse level writing in mild aphasia. ARCS-W focuses on the cognitive and linguistic skills required for discourse production. Method This study was a within-subject pre-postdesign. Three people with mild aphasia participated. ARCS-W integrates attentive reading or listening with constrained summarization of discourse level material in spoken and written modalities. Outcomes included macro- (main concepts) and microlinguistic (correct information units, complete utterances) discourse measures, confrontation naming, aphasia severity, and functional communication. Results All 3 participants demonstrated some generalization to untrained spoken and written discourse at the word, sentence, and text levels. Reduced aphasia severity and/or increased functional communication and confrontation naming were also observed in some participants. Conclusions The findings of this study provide preliminary evidence of the efficacy of ARCS-W to improve spoken and written discourse in mild aphasia. Different generalization patterns suggest different mechanisms of improvement. Further research and replication are required to better understand how ARCS-W can impact discourse abilities.