E-Inclusion: Defining Basic Image Properties for Illustrated Stimuli in Aphasia Treatment

Abstract

Word production is stimulated by images in treatment processes for people with aphasia (Heuer & Hallowell, 2007). Although stimulation through pictorial stimuli has a long tradition in aphasia therapy, there is a lack in research on which image stimuli are the most suitable for this purpose (Brown & Thiessen, 2018). Current research assumes that stimulation via photographic images evokes better and more direct retrieve of searched words, than stimulation by illustrations (Heuer, 2016). However, the illustrations investigated so far mostly comprise black and white line drawings and there are hardly any studies investigating possible effects of different image parameters as style, image cropping or perspective in relation to clear naming. We developed a visual concept of illustrated images enabling clear determinability of activities and objects. The 128 designed stimuli that meet linguistic research criteria were named by 62 students regarding "name agreement" and evaluated on a 5-point scale with respect to "visual complexity" and "image agreement". The illustrated images will be examined in a following study regarding the correctness of the naming by persons with aphasia and be compared with corresponding photographic stimuli. The analysis presented here is part of the study E-Inclusion, an interdisciplinary project that includes researchers in life science technology, linguistics and speech therapy as well as image research from the University of Applied Sciences and Art Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW).