Aerobic Exercise and Aphasia Treatment

There will be three blocks of treatment, ideally three times a week 100 minutes per day. Treatment will target impairment-directed speech language therapy (SLT) approaches or compensatory-directed SLT in each of the three treatment blocks. Half of the participants will receive the impairment-directed SLT. Half of the participants, will receive treatment that will target compensatory-directed speech language therapy approaches that are focused on functional communication skills in the conversational context. Methods of treatment will include PACE (Promoting Aphasics Communicative Effectiveness (Davis, 2005), conversational coaching (Hopper et al., 2002), and supported conversation (Kagan et al., 2001). The clinician will model and encourage all (verbal and non verbal) modalities of communication.

30 minutes background music only

There will be three blocks of treatment and the AE will take place for all participants during one or two treatment blocks (randomly assigned), threetimes a week (sessions are three times a week prior to speech therapy but may be one or two times a week if a session is missed or may be up to four or five times a week if one or two sessions are missed and rescheduled due to weather or other circumstances).