Modifying Melodic Intonation Therapy

Reports of the MIT protocol developed in the 1970s by the Boston group [2,3] emphasized that it was a language training program that used operant conditioning principles to treat adults with moderate nonfluent (Broca’s-type) aphasia. The authors reported success in increasing the expressive abilities of some individuals with aphasia for whom other clinical approaches had failed. The authors described MIT as a programmed approach with two levels of increasing difficulty, each level consisting of several steps. Short phrases or sentences were imbedded in simple, non-distinct melody patterns.