We're a speech therapy software company making evidence-based treatment for adults with stroke, brain injury, and other conditions more accessible.
⛓️💥 You can’t sentence without a verb
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In non-fluent aphasia, nouns tend to dominate verbal communication. It makes sense. They're concrete, visible, and easy to picture. But then your patient tries to tell you something: Wait, what?! 🧠 Why verbs are harder"Apple" is a simple object. You can draw it, hold it, picture it instantly. "Kick" refuses to sit still. It's a soccer ball flying through the air, a karate move, a bad habit you're trying to quit, or a baby in the womb. The semantic representation of a verb is just inherently more complex and context-dependent, which makes the retrieval process harder. And then on top of that, verbs carry grammatical weight that nouns don't. Tense. Agreement. Kicked. Is kicking. Will kick. So verb retrieval isn't just harder because of stroke damage. Verbs were already doing more work to begin with. 💡 The good news about treatmentThere's a solid evidence base around verb-focused treatment in aphasia, and one of the more interesting findings is generalization. When you directly treat a set of verbs, you often see improvement in untreated vocabulary too (Edmonds, 2016). The theory is that words aren't stored in isolation. They live in semantic networks. But verbs have an extra layer: because they require agents, objects, and context to function, treating one verb automatically pulls in a bunch of connected words. So you're not just strengthening the verb. You’re strengthening everything attached to it. 🛠️ What we're working onNow, I know you didn’t go into speech pathology to spend your evenings building verb lists. 🫠 That's why we've been building a new verb treatment in the Tactus Virtual Rehab Center. Let's take these principles and put them into a structured, ready-to-use format, so you spend less time prepping and more time treating. Already using the Advanced Naming Therapy app? Think of this as the faster, smarter sibling. It's streamlined for more repetitions and has automated feedback scoring for every entry. Our patients need verbs to fully communicate their ideas, feelings, and experiences. And I don't know about you, but I really want to know what went down with Grandma in that garage. 🦝 Strengthening Verb Networks is dropping very soon... 👀 Start your free 3-week trial now and you'll have access the moment it goes live.
Until next time, P.S. The VRC is being updated all the time. I'm curious... what are the biggest gaps in your practice right now? Hit reply and let me know. |
Tactus Therapy
We're a speech therapy software company making evidence-based treatment for adults with stroke, brain injury, and other conditions more accessible.
Your brain keeps two records of everything you read. One stores the gist. This is the meaning, the shape of it, what it was roughly about. The other stores the verbatim trace: the actual words, the specific details, the data point in the third paragraph. The gist is durable. It sticks around, gets consolidated into long-term memory, and becomes part of what you "know." The verbatim trace is fragile. It starts degrading almost immediately. To be fair, it's supposed to. Retaining every word of...
Reading a text message. Skimming a menu. Catching up on the news. Most of us don't think twice about these things... until we can't do them the way we used to. After a stroke or brain injury, reading often gets harder, slower, and more exhausting. If you've noticed this, you're not alone. 🧠 What's going on in the brain Reading isn't a single skill. It's a complex chain of steps your brain performs in a fraction of a second: recognizing letters, combining them into words, pulling meaning from...
A patient reads “dog” easily. And the non-word “slib” without hesitation. But show them “plaid" and they said "played." The word "island" becomes "iz-land." What's going on here? 🤔 Answer: surface alexia (the phonological route is intact; irregularly spelled words are a struggle) If you got that – kudos! 🤗If you didn’t… don’t beat yourself up. 🥴 Even if you nailed the diagnosis, the treatment details for surface alexia might be rusty. As SLPs, we're expected to hold a lot of information in...