Errors-based Rehabilitation within Phonological Framework: Segmental Changes in Broca’s Aphasia

The studies of phonological therapy for patients with both phonemic planning and articulatory implementation deficits report the related dichotomy of anterior and posterior syndrome with psycholinguistic model. However, there must be some investigation on segmental errors as input of rehabilitation within phonological framework. This study investigates whether the errors-based rehabilitation model can encourage two Balinese individuals with Broca's aphasia (KW and NS) to reduce the phonological errors. The results showed that KW and NS performed different segmental errors and types of the phonological process even though they suffered from identical non-fluent symptom. KW, in pre-intervention tended to present phonemes substitution, omission and insertion errors which mostly occurred in the initial position of words and he transposed the onset of the second syllable to the onset of the first syllable. Meanwhile, NS in some cases, tended to transpose the phonemes randomly, inserted other segments – especially [nasal] and [lateral] between two vowels (hiatuses) and altered the high complex segments with less complex ones. The phonological error-based rehabilitation was effective to reduce the errors and the phonetic relaxation helped them exhibit minor errors. This indicated that phonetic based training can stimulate the articulatory processing deficit as anterior syndrome.