Effects of a Mapping Therapy Program for Patients with Broca’s Aphasia: Focus on Sentence Comprehension and Production

Purpose: This study investigated the effects of a mapping therapy program on sentence comprehension, sentence production, and spontaneous speech in adults with Broca’s aphasia. Methods: Four adults with moderate to severe Broca’s aphasia participated in a single-subject design study consisting of a pre-assessment, 16 therapy sessions, and a post-assessment. A Korean-adapted mapping therapy program was applied, and outcomes were measured using sentence comprehension, sentence production, and spontaneous speech analysis. Results: All participants showed improvements in sentence comprehension and production, with average increases of 13.1% and 34.3%, respectively. Improvements were also observed in grammaticality, mean length of utterance, and sentence complexity in spontaneous speech. Conclusion: Mapping therapy effectively enhanced syntactic processing and grammatical accuracy and promoted generalization to spontaneous speech. These findings suggest its clinical value in language rehabilitation for individuals with Broca’s aphasia.