The Speech & Language Recovery Laboratory, led by Marja-Liisa Mailend, PhD, is concluding a clinical trial titled "Efficacy and Optimization of Speech Entrainment Practice for People with Aphasia". This project, funded by the NIH and the Albert Einstein Society, aimed to evaluate and refine a promising treatment technique, termed Speech Entrainment Practice, for people with aphasia. Aphasia is an acquired language deficit that affects approximately 2.5 million Americans. By disrupting communication, its impact is felt in almost all human relationships and activities of daily living. Various treatments exist that promote language recovery in aphasia, but substantial communication challenges typically persist even after therapy ends. The focus of this project is a promising yet nascent approach for remediating speech production difficulties—speech entrainment.
Speech entrainment refers to the act of speaking in unison with a model speaker by imitating her speech (and accompanying mouth-movements) in real time. The study investigated the direct impact of a single intensive treatment session of speech entrainment on participants’ ability to produce speech independently. Additionally, it explored which treatment conditions might enhance the effectiveness of this treatment approach.
Findings showed that one session of speech entrainment led to improved independent speech production 24 hours after treatment. Gains were more pronounced in trained stories compared to untrained ones, strengthening the interpretation that improvements were treatment-related. The study also compared two delivery modes: audiovisual and auditory-only. Results indicated no significant advantage of one mode over the other. While individual responses varied, differences between conditions were not clinically meaningful. The study further examined training schedules to determine if massed practice (repeating one story consecutively multiple times) or distributed practice (alternating between different stories) yielded better outcomes. Again, no significant differences emerged; participants who improved did so under both conditions.
In summary, speech entrainment—whether auditory or audiovisual—proved effective in enhancing speech production in individuals with chronic aphasia. The lack of significant differences between the studied treatment conditions may suggest that entrainment practice can be individualized within these parameters according to client's preference and logistical necessities of treatment delivery. The large amount of data that this project yielded allows us to explore many other important questions. For example, what are the characteristics of those who benefit from speech entrainment practice? Which aspects of speech and language can be expected to improve? Dr. Mailend looks forward to addressing these questions in future research studies with the ultimate goal of developing treatment protocols that can be implemented in the clinic to help people with aphasia better recover their communication skills.