Response Elaboration Training: Application to Procedural Discourse and Personal Recounts

Wambaugh, Julie and Nesser, Christina and Wright, Sandra (2012) Response Elaboration Training: Application to Procedural Discourse and Personal Recounts. [Clinical Aphasiology Paper]

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Abstract

Response Elaboration Training (RET; Kearns, 1985) is a verbal production treatment for aphasia that was designed to facilitate increased content and length of utterances. 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. RET entails elicitation of verbal productions of the speaker’s choice in response to action pictures. Then, clinician modeling and forward-chaining are employed to assist the speaker in expanding upon his/her original production. Kearns and colleagues conducted a systematic series of investigations to examine the effects of RET (Gaddie, Kearns, & Yedor, 1991; Kearns, 1985; Kearns, 1986; Kearns & Scher, 1989; Kearns & Yedor, 1991). Wambaugh and colleagues (2000; 2001) modified RET to allow application with persons with apraxia of speech and Conley and Coelho (2003) combined RET with Semantic Feature Analysis (Boyle & Coelho, 1995). Across the relatively numerous RET investigations, 17 persons with aphasia have demonstrated positive effects of treatment (12 with Broca’s aphasia, 3 with anomic aphasia, and 2 with conduction aphasia). Aphasia severity among participants has ranged from relatively mild to severe. Although strong response generalization effects of treatment have been demonstrated for RET (i.e., improved responding with similar, untrained pictures), stimulus generalization has received relatively limited study. Kearns and Scher (1989) found mixed results with respect to elicited discourse for three speakers. Wambaugh and Martinez (2000) reported modest changes in personal recounts for two of three speakers as a result of picture level RET training. When they modified RET to apply it without pictures in a personal recount condition, slight additional gains were evidenced. We speculated that application of RET without pictures, but in a more structured condition than personal recounts, may stimulate generalized responding. Consequently, this investigation was designed to explore the effects of RET applied to procedural discourse as well as to personal recounts.

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