RET Treatment In Broca's Aphasia Patients

Several treatments have been developed in order to focus on the rehabilitation of language that is damaged when an individual acquires aphasia as a result of a stroke or traumatic brain injury (TBI). In 1985, Kearns introduced a unique treatment approach called Response elaboration training (RET) pertaining to individuals with Broca’s aphasia. Kearn’s wanted to evaluate the effectiveness and generality of RET by determining whether or not RET improved verbal sentence production through an increase in content words and length in utterance.
Theoretical foundation RET is a therapy technique designed to facilitate the number of content words in spontaneous speech for individuals with fluent aphasia. A person with aphasia can benefit from expanding content in conversation including those with apraxia. RET was developed on the premise that treatment should encourage the creative use of language rather than restrict the speaker’s productions to predetermined, convergent responses (Wambaugh
The basic procedure for RET entails elicitation of verbal productions of the patient elaborating on responses to action picture stimuli. A patient’s utterance is pertinent as it is used as the starting point for treatment. The clinician will build upon the patient’s response by asking a series of “wh-questions” and then the patient will continue their response by repeating the expansion back and forth. In addition, if the patient does not produce a content word, the clinician will model the appropriate sentence production. Clinician reinforcement, modeling, additional prompts, and forward chaining are employed to expand on the original utterance (Wambaugh et al., 2013). RET continued to have consistent positive effects in the narrative discourse with picture stimuli for individuals with fluent aphasia. However, RET did not accommodate to non-fluent aphasics