Personalised Cuing Therapy

(Olsen et al 2012) Aphasiology

Cues: Initial phoneme cues, associated words, Rhyming sounds/words, sentence completion, written word, gestures.

Personalised cuing
= a semantic cuing method, since cues are generated using the patients personal semantic information about a target word.

E.g. Football = your team is Arsenal, you coached a team in Hackney Fields

- Ties in past experience and gives the word a semantic context.

Treatment

1. Generate personalised cues for a word.
2. Show a picture of the target word, giving the personalised cue and ask the patient to name it. Multiple personalised cues can be used including sentence completion e.g. In hacney FIelds you coach.......

Theory

• In this way the word becomes associated with personal semantic information and later retrieval is facilitated.
• Cognitive analysis of a word/ item will support retrieval of the word.
• Semantic encoding is more effective than phonological encoding.

Results of the study

• Personalised cuing therapy improved naming accuracy and improved naming in naturalistic settings.

My Experiences of Using Personalised Cuing Therapy

I used personalised cuing therapy for a patient who had a large LMCA and a severe expressive and mild receptive aphasia. I chose this therapy because the patient was very resistant to using any form of AAC including total communication strategies. I interviewed the patient's son in order to get very personalised information on words which would be functional for the patient at home e.g. 'Dinner Club' - place where the patient went every week to meet friends and have food. The patient engaged with this form of therapy and improved his naming of functional words. His family also stated that they appreciated being involved in his therapy.