Samantha Goodrick

• BSc (Hons) Speech and Language Sciences
• Validating illustrations in a new writing therapy resource for use with adults with aphasia

There are 1.2million stroke survivors living in the UK, 33% of whom have subsequent aphasia (a speech, language and/or communication difficulty). Newcastle University Speech and Language Sciences are developing new picture-based worksheets to support people with aphasia to write everyday words as this is a useful communication strategy for many. The pictures being used are new so it was not known how people would interpret them. This project investigated: what words people think of when they see the pictures (naming agreement), and how well people thought the pictures represented the words they are supposed to. Overall, all the images were rated very highly for how well they represent the word, and most also had high naming agreement. The pictures with more varied naming responses were collated into a list so that clinicians can be better informed when using these more ambiguous images with clients.

Funding source: Newcastle University

Supervisors: Dr Julie Morris and Dr Janet Webster