The effects of silent visuomotor cueing on word retrieval in Broca's aphasies: A pilot study

About a quarter of stroke patients worldwide suffer serious language disorders such as aphasias. Most common symptoms of Broca's aphasia are word naming disorders which highly impact verbal communication and the quality of life of aphasic patients. In order to recover disturbances in word retrieval, several cueing methods (i.e. phonemic and semantic) have been established to improve lexical access establishing effective language rehabilitation techniques. Based on recent evidence from action-perception theories, which postulate that neural circuits for speech perception and articulation are tightly coupled, in the present work, we propose and investigate an alternative type of cueing using silent articulation-related visual stimuli. We hypothesize that providing patients with primes in the form of silent videos showing lip motions representative of correct pronunciation of target words, will result in faster word retrieval than when no such cue is provided. To test our prediction, we realize a longitudinal clinical virtual reality-based trial with four post-stroke Broca's patients and compare the interaction times between the two conditions over the eight weeks of the therapy. Our results suggest that silent visuomotor cues indeed facilitate word retrieval and verbal execution, and might be beneficial in lexical relearning in chronic Broca's patients.