Recruiting

Telerehabilitation

Sponsor:

University of South Carolina

Code:

NCT04682223

Conditions

Aphasia

Stroke

Stroke Rehabilitation

Eligibility Criteria

Sex: All

Age: 21 - 70+

Healthy Volunteers: Not accepted

Interventions

Semantically-focused therapy tasks

Phonologically-focused therapy tasks

Study Details

Brief summary:

Speech-language therapy is generally found to be helpful in the rehabilitation of aphasia. However, not all patients with aphasia have access to adequate treatment to maximize their recovery. The goal of this project is to compare the efficacy of telerehabilitation or Aphasia Remote Therapy (ART) to the more traditional In-Clinic Therapy (I-CT).

Conditions

Aphasia

Stroke

Stroke Rehabilitation

Study ID

NCT04682223

Start date

May 5, 2021

Status verified date

Mar, 2026

Completion date

Mar, 2027

Anticipated

Primary completion date

Jan, 2027

Anticipated

Eligibility Criteria

Eligibility Criteria

Sex: All

Age: 21 - 70+

Healthy Volunteers: Not accepted

Inclusion Criteria:

1. Participants must have sustained a left hemisphere ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke at least 12 months prior to enrollment.
2. Participants must primarily speak English for at least the past 20 years.
3. Participants must be capable of giving informed consent or indicating another to provide informed consent.
4. Participants must be between 21-80 years of age.
5. Participants must be magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) compatible (e.g., no metal implants, not claustrophobic) on a 3-Tesla (3T) scanner.

Exclusion Criteria:

1. Participants must not have previous neurological disease affecting the brain (e.g. history of traumatic brain injury).
2. Participants must not have severely limited speech production (severe unintelligibility) and/or auditory comprehension that interferes with adequate participation in the therapy provided (i.e., WAB-R Spontaneous Speech rating scale score of 0-1 or WAB-R Comprehension score of 0-1).
3. Participants must not have a history of stroke to the right hemisphere of the brain.
4. Participants must not have a bilateral, cerebellar or brainstem stroke.
5. Participants must not have anything that makes them be 3T MRI incompatible
6. Insufficient intelligible speech to provide accurate responses with discourse/naming.

Study Design

Enrollment

100 participants

Anticipated

Allocation

Randomized

Intervention Model

Parallel Assignment

Primary purpose

Treatment

Interventions and Outcome Measures

Arms

experimental: Aphasia Remote Therapy (ART)

All participants in this group will receive 3 weeks of daily semantically-focused treatment (semantic feature analysis, semantic barrier task and verb network strengthening therapy) and 3 weeks of daily phonologically-focused treatment (phonological components analysis, phonological production task, phonological judgment task). Participants will be randomized to order of treatment.

All treatment will be done remotely with a speech-language pathologist through an online platform using therapy applications. Participants will be provided with teletherapy kits (including an Internet hotspot if needed) to complete the therapy tasks.

active comparator: In-Clinic Therapy (I-CT)

All participants in this group will receive 3 weeks of daily semantically-focused treatment (semantic feature analysis, semantic barrier task and verb network strengthening therapy) and 3 weeks of daily phonologically-focused treatment (phonological components analysis, phonological production task, phonological judgment task). Participants will be randomized to order of treatment.

All treatment will be done in person with a speech-language pathologist at the UofSC Aphasia Lab.

Interventions

Semantically-focused therapy tasks

1\) Semantic feature analysis (SFA; Boyle \& Coelho, 1995; Boyle, 2004). For each pictured stimulus the participant is prompted to name the picture. Then, s/he is encouraged to produce semantically related words that represent features similar to the target word. 2) Semantic barrier task. This approach includes features of the Promoting Aphasics' Communication Effectiveness (PACE; Davis \& Wilcox,1985). The goal of the task is for one participant (e.g., person with aphasia) to describe each card so that the other participant (e.g., clinician) can guess the picture on the card. 3) Verb network strengthening therapy (VNeST; Edmonds et al., 2009; 2014) targets lexical retrieval of verbs and their thematic nouns. The objective of VNeST is for the participant to generate verb-noun associates with the purpose of strengthening the connections between the verb and its thematic roles.

Phonologically-focused therapy tasks

1\) Phonological components analysis task (PCA; Leonard et al., 2008). The participant first attempts to name a given picture and then to identify the phonological features of the target words. 2) Phonological production task focuses on the identification of phonological features of targeted, imageable nouns and verbs. It requires the participant to sort picture stimuli based on the number of syllables and then to identify a hierarchy of phonological features. Once each targeted feature is identified for the pair of words, the participant is required to blend the syllables/sounds together. 3) Phonological judgment task relies on computerized presentation of verbs and nouns where participants are required to judge whether pairs of words include similar phonological features (e.g. # of syllables, initial phonemes, final phonemes, rhyming).

Primary outcome measure

  • Speech Production Outcome Score (SPOTS) [ Time Frame: Compare baseline score to 6 month follow-up (after treatment) score. ]

Central Contacts and Locations

Central contacts

Sara Sayers, M.S.

803-777-2693ssayers@mailbox.sc.edu

Kelli Powell, B.S.

803-777-5051KELLIAP@mailbox.sc.edu

Locations

University of South Carolina Aphasia Lab

Recruiting

Columbia, South Carolina, United States, 29201

Contacts

Sara Sayers, M.S.

803-777-2693ssayers@mailbox.sc.edu

Kelli Powell, B.S.

803-777-5051kelliap@mailbox.sc.edu

Principal Investigator:

Julius Fridriksson, Ph.D

More Information

Sponsor

University of South Carolina

Last update posted

Apr 2, 2026

Last verified

Mar, 2026

Keywords

  • aphasia
  • stroke
  • telerehabilitation
  • speech-language therapy

Trial information was received from ClinicalTrials.gov and was last updated on 2026-09-10. This information was provided to ClinicalTrials.gov by University of South Carolina on 2026-04-02.