Lauryn Zipse

• PhD, CCC-SLP
• Professor (Associate) at MGH Institute for Health Professions

It is unclear whether individuals with agrammatic aphasia have particularly disrupted prosody, or in fact have relatively preserved prosody they can use in a compensatory way. A targeted literature review was undertaken to examine the evidence regarding the capacity of speakers with agrammatic aphasia to produce prosody. The aim was to answer the q...

Purpose Unison production is a common aphasia treatment technique in which the clinician and the person with aphasia (PWA) produce phrases aloud together. It can be implemented using a typical “conversational,” syntax-influenced prosodic timing structure, or with a “metrical,” beat-based timing structure, but to date no study has directly compared...

Purpose The purpose of this clinical focus article is to explore how the concept of meta-therapy applies within the domain and treatment of cognitive-communication disorders. Method We briefly introduce the concept of meta-therapy, first introduced by Helou (2017), and explore how the concept of meta-therapy may be applied to the treatment of cogn...

Purpose Script training is a well-established treatment for aphasia, but its evidence comes almost exclusively from monolingual English speakers with aphasia. Furthermore, its active ingredients and profiles of people with aphasia (PWA) that respond to this treatment remain understudied. This study aimed to adapt a scripted-sentence learning protoc...

Background: Achieving activity participation goals is a key factor in quality of life (QOL) for people with aphasia (PWA), but expressing participation goals can be difficult for many of them. Proxy reports by caregivers may not accurately reflect the interests and participation goals of PWA, and discrepancies in these goals between PWA and their...

Background: Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT) is a structured, intensive therapy for recovery of verbal output in people with nonfluent, Broca’s type, aphasia. Stemming from the observation that people with nonfluent aphasia can sometimes sing fluently, MIT was developed with two distinctive “musical” features. The first is intonation of phrases, ty...

Background: Melodic intonation therapy (MIT) is a widely used treatment for nonfluent aphasia that builds upon a number of musical elements in order to ultimately improve generative language. These include intoning syllables on different pitches, using a metrically regular speech rhythm, and the clinician and patient producing phrases in unison. St...

The production of speech and music are two human behaviors that involve complex hierarchical structures with implications for timing. Timing constraints may arise from a human proclivity to form 'self-organized' metrical structures for perceived and produced event sequences, especially those that involve repetition. To test whether the propensity t...

Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine (a) which factors may affect singers' completing voice therapy, and (b) develop predictive profiles to capture those singers at risk for dropping out of voice therapy. Study design: A case-control study was conducted comparing singers who completed voice therapy to singers who dropped out of...

The ability to find the beat in a sequence of auditory events may be linked to the ability to learn vocal communication, raising the question of how beat structure in speech events relates to that in other event sequences. We conducted a series of entrainment experiments designed to compare spoken syllable repetition with tapping. Producing taps to...

Purpose In this study, the authors tested whether people with aphasia (PWAs) show an impaired ability to process rhythm, both in terms of perception and production. Method Two experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, 16 PWAs and 15 age-matched control participants performed 3 rhythm tasks: tapping along to short rhythms, tapping these same rhy...

Background: Phonological treatments to improve naming ability in aphasia focus on re-strengthening connections within the phonological system. Nonetheless, the efficacy of phonological treatments is still being explored with particular consideration of cognitive neuropsychological perspectives. Clinicians may also need to consider lexical factors t...

This article evaluates a threefold approach for assessing cultural and linguistic diversity (CLD) content in the core curriculum of a speech-language pathology master's program. A standard syllabus review was supplemented with individual faculty interviews and a student-generated review of course content. The data from the three approaches were ent...

Using an adapted version of Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT), we treated an adolescent girl with a very large left-hemisphere lesion and severe nonfluent aphasia secondary to an ischemic stroke. At the time of her initial assessment 15 months after her stroke, she had reached a plateau in her recovery despite intense and long-term traditional speec...

Although up to 25% of children with autism are non-verbal, there are very few interventions that can reliably produce significant improvements in speech output. Recently, a novel intervention called Auditory-Motor Mapping Training (AMMT) has been developed, which aims to promote speech production directly by training the association between sounds...

Purpose To explore whether individuals with aphasia exhibit differences in the M350, an electrophysiological marker of lexical activation, compared with healthy controls. Method Seven people with aphasia, 9 age-matched controls, and 10 younger controls completed an auditory lexical decision task while cortical activity was recorded with magnetoenc...

Previous studies have suggested that patients' potential for poststroke language recovery is related to lesion size; however, lesion location may also be of importance, particularly when fiber tracts that are critical to the sensorimotor mapping of sounds for articulation (eg, the arcuate fasciculus) have been damaged. In this study, we tested the...

It has been reported for more than 100 years that patients with severe nonfluent aphasia are better at singing lyrics than they are at speaking the same words. This observation led to the development of melodic intonation therapy (MIT). However, the efficacy of this therapy has yet to be substantiated in a randomized controlled trial. Furthermore,...

Individuals with autism show impairments in emotional tuning, social interactions and communication. These are functions that have been attributed to the putative human mirror neuron system (MNS), which contains neurons that respond to the actions of self and others. It has been proposed that a dysfunction of that system underlies some of the chara...

Aphasia is an acquired impairment of language ability that occurs secondary to brain damage, and auditory comprehension deficits are a defining component of aphasia. At the single-word level, these deficits are thought to arise from impaired phonological processing, semantic representations, or both. The present study examined spreading lexical act...

For more than 100 years, clinicians have noted that patients with nonfluent aphasia are capable of singing words that they cannot speak. Thus, the use of melody and rhythm has long been recommended for improving aphasic patients' fluency, but it was not until 1973 that a music-based treatment [Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT)] was developed. Our on...

During a sexual encounter with a male rat, a female rat will display both receptive (lordosis) and proceptive (hopping, darting, and ear-wiggling) behaviors. Additionally, if mating occurs in an environment where the female rat may approach and withdraw from the male rat, she will control the timing of the receipt of mounts, intromissions, and ejac...