Development of Speech-Language Therapy Program kMIT for Aphasic Patients Following Brain Injury and Its Clinical Effects

뇌 손상 후 실어증 환자의 언어치료 프로그램 kMIT의 개발 및 임상적 효과

MIT has been applied for nonfluent aphasic patients on the basis of lateralization of brain hemisphere. However, its applications for different languages have some inquiry for aphasic patients because of prosodic and rhythmic differences. The purpose of this study is to develop the Korean Melodic Intonation Therapy program using personal computer and its clinical effects for nonfluent aphasic patients. The algorithm was composed to voice analog signal, PCM, AMDF, Short-time autocorrelation function and center clipping. The main menu contains pitch, waveform, sound intensity and speech files on window. Aphasic patients' intonation patterns overlay on selected kMIT patterns. Three aphasic patients with or without kMIT training participated in this study. Four affirmative sentences and two interrogative sentences were uttered on CSL by stimulus of ST. VOT, VD, Hold and TD were measured on Spectrogram. In addition, articulation disorders and intonation patterns were evaluated objectively on spectrogram. The results indicated that nonfluent aphasic patients with kMIT training group showed some clinical effects of speech intelligibility based on VOT, TD values, articulation evaluation and prosodic pattern changes.