Use and Perceived Effectiveness of Communication Modes Reported by Persons With Primary Progressive Aphasia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose: Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a clinical neurodegenerative dementia syndrome characterized by early, selective, and progressive language impairment. PPA onset is gradual, providing time to potentially identify additional or alternative expressive communication modes; however, reports of communication mode use and effectiveness by persons with PPA have not been described. This study characterized the use, frequency, and perceived effectiveness of communication modes reported by individuals with PPA. Method: Forty-one participants with mild-to-moderate PPA completed a structured interview detailing the type, frequency, and perceived effectiveness of 12 potential communication modes, categorized by technology required (no-tech, low-tech, and high-tech). The ratio of modes used was compared across technology categories with a repeated-measures generalized linear model assuming a binomial distribution with an overall Wald chi-square statistic, followed by pairwise post hoc t -test comparisons. Results: Of the 12 communication modes assessed, participants reported using a median of eight (range: 5–10). All participants affirmed using speech, facial expressions, and talking on the phone. Frequency and perceived effectiveness ratings for these three modes were endorsed at the “some/most of the time” level for more than 80% of the participants. No-tech mode use was significantly higher than reported high-tech and low-tech modes ( p = .004 and p < .0001, respectively). Even so, while some high-tech modes (apps) and some low-tech modes (nonelectronic augmentative and alternative communication) had fewer users, effectiveness ratings were moderate to high for all but one user. Conclusions: Persons with mild-to-moderate language impairment due to PPA report using a range of communication modes with moderate-to-high frequency and perceived effectiveness. These outcomes provide practical information when considering mode refinement or expansion during intervention to maximize communication participation. Barriers to modality use may include low awareness or access, which could be queried by future studies and supported by speech and language interventions. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21614262
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".