Attentive Reading and Constrained Summarisation (ARCS) discourse treatment for chronic Wernicke's aphasia

Background: Emerging evidence suggests that discourse-level treatments can improve microlinguistic processes such as lexical retrieval. Attentive Reading and Constrained Summarisation (ARCS) is a cognitive-linguistic discourse treatment that focuses attention on reading aloud and orally summarising text while constraining from non-specific language use.Aims: The primary aim of the current study was to evaluate the effect of ARCS on improving lexical retrieval abilities in two participants with Wernicke's aphasia.Methods & Procedures: Two women with chronic moderate and severe Wernicke's aphasia were administered ARCS for this case study. The study design was comprised of pre-treatment testing followed by 18 times of 50-minute sessions of ARCS therapy over 10 weeks and post-treatment testing immediately after and 2 months after the completion of treatment. Treatment stimuli included abridged versions of news articles. Primary outcome measures of lexical retrieval were the Boston Naming Test 2nd edition and informativeness of words during picture description and untreated article retell tasks.Outcomes & Results: The participant with moderate Wernicke's aphasia improved on all three primary outcome measures, and she reported that the treatment made a functional impact on her life. In contrast, the participant with severe Wernicke's aphasia did not improve on any of the outcome measures. Individual differences between the participants likely account for the discrepancy in treatment outcomes.Conclusions: ARCS demonstrates potential as a therapy for improving lexical retrieval in discourse with the possibility of generalisation to confrontation naming in persons with moderate Wernicke's aphasia.