Non Fluent Aphasia

Therapy for non-fluent aphasia can focus on many different facets of the disorder. A speech pathologist might want to focus on one particular area more than any other, while others may want to take a more holistic approach at treating the disorder. Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT) is one kind of therapy used to treat non-fluent aphasia. MIT provides a speech pathologist with the option of focusing on one aspect of non-fluent aphasia while simultaneously bettering other factors of the patient’s life. With a disorder that causes frustration non-fluent aphasia, a music-focused therapy can be of relief in many. Not only does MIT influence the progress made with speech but also subsequently helps improve a patient’s overall quality of life.

Conklyn et.al. conducted a pilot study in which they tested 30 participants to analyze their abilities before and after music therapy for 3 sessions. A music therapist taught the participant one phrase per session using MIT by singing it to a melody and had them repeat it. After one session the therapist would decide if it was appropriate to teach the participant the second phrase. The researchers found almost instantaneous improvement of speech production after just one session of MIT. By using melodies, patients are able to hold some features of the phrase sung and can then further develop their speech abilities making their overall progress increase (Conklyn et al., 2012). MIT shows benefits for patients with non-fluent aphasia. Improving speech production reduces the frustration a non-fluent person can experience when they can’t express themselves. This shows more reason to further research this kind of treatment and see the full effect MIT has on speech in people who have cases of non-fluent

Zumbansen, Peretz, and Hebert (2014) studied the effects of melodic therapy, rhythmic therapy without musical pitch, and spoken therapy without pitch or rhythmic aspects on 3 French participants. The researchers taught the participants 20 phrases. To study and observe MIT, the participant would repeat the phrase twice with the researcher, and then the researcher would fade out as they repeated it again, afterwards the participant would attempt to repeat the phrase without the melodic cues, and lastly they would answer a question with that phrase. According to Zumbansen et al. (2014), “all three forms of therapies led to improvements on trained sentences but their capacity to generalize these gains to non-trained sentences varied”(p.7) however, melodic therapy proved to be the therapy that helped the most with generalization effects. They found that using different kinds of cues while also using repetition could make therapy that is more effective in treating more than one aspect of non-fluent aphasia (Zumbansen et al., 2014). MIT is successful within the population of people who have non-fluent aphasia because it offers them a treatment with a lot of individual support. None of the research reported effective use of MIT in group settings. Cues, such as modeling, provide