Communicative Strengths in Severe Aphasia: The Famous People Protocol and Its Value in Planning Treatment.
Audrey Holland, Margaret Forbes, Davida Fromm and 1 others
PMID 31120767WHAT IT FOUND
The Famous People Protocol helps therapists spot communication strategies people with severe aphasia can actually use, like gesturing or singing, instead of just failing to name.
It is not a standardized test, but a clinical tool to plan treatment based on preserved strengths.
Key findings
01The protocol identifies strategies such as writing, gesturing, or singing that people with severe aphasia use to communicate, which standard naming tests miss.
02Scores on the protocol correlated moderately with the Western Aphasia Battery Aphasia Quotient, indicating it measures different aspects of communication than standard impairment tests.
03It is explicitly not a formal psychometric assessment or standardized test, but a clinical tool for exploring individual communication abilities.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study focuses on severe aphasia; results may not apply to milder cases. The protocol is not standardized or psychometrically validated for formal assessment. Stimuli may become outdated (e.g., athlete fame) or culturally specific, though Canadian participants performed well. Only a subset of the AphasiaBank data was analyzed for this paper.
Declared interests
Funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (Grant R01-DC008524). No other conflicts declared.
The easy way to misread this
Do not treat the Famous People Protocol as a standardized diagnostic test. It is not psychometrically validated for formal assessment, and its purpose is to qualitatively identify communication strategies for treatment planning, not to measure severity.