| Investigations of morphological impairment in aphasia have revealed that patients may retain knowledge of a word's morphological status even when they cannot access that word (Delazer & Semenza, 1998). In addition, aphasiological investigations have shown that more errors are produced with multimorphemic words than with monomorphemic words (e.g., Nasti & Marangolo, 2005). This points to the fact that even though individuals with aphasia seem to have retained sensitivity to morphological status and morphological structure of words, they are unable to process morphologically complex words with ease. The goal of this thesis was to investigate whether a therapy that focuses on morphology, the Morphological Therapy Protocol (MTP), will improve the processing of multimorphemic words in these patients.;The results of the MTP administration confirm that the notion of morphological constituents is important and that these constituents are involved in the processing of morphologically complex words.;The MTP provides morphological training with four tasks administered sequentially in intense one-hour treatments over a period of only twelve days. Therapy effectiveness was measured by analyzing pre-therapy and post-therapy reading-aloud accuracy scores. The analyses of four patients' accuracy scores show significant reading-aloud improvement with therapy across trained and untrained words (trained words: p < 0.0001, control words: p < 0.04, new words: p < 0.0001). In addition, the therapy effect was maintained over a three-month post-therapy maintenance period. |
