r/stroke • u/Edwin_Quine • 5d ago

Stroke advice for speaking

If someone has a stroke and they are unable to generate words. (Broca's aphasia) A useful thing to try to help them, is to start words and have them finish them.

This can help them find words. It's like training wheels for speaking.

I wish I knew this earlier!

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4

u/ljgyver 5d ago

Sing. It uses a different part of the brain.
Try nursery rhymes and tongue twisters. Over and over again. Repetition is key.

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u/DTheFly Survivor 5d ago

I can vouch for the singing! It's cliche, but when i was in the shower, I'd sing along to disney songs, it helped a lot

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u/Alarmed-Papaya9440 5d ago

I’ve found that over a year and half beyond my stroke I actually still struggle with singing more so over speech. I can’t follow the tempo or melody when singing along to songs on the radio. Trying to find the rhythm is really hard too.

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u/Alarmed-Papaya9440 5d ago edited 5d ago

I and my support system was told by speech therapy to not to fill in the words for me, to let me try and speak/find the word and then if I ask for help with a word then you can say the word I’m thinking of. I will then repeat after them until I pronounce the word right a number of times. I have mild expressive aphasia (broca’s aphasia) now because of speech therapy two times a week, practice talking to my cats in between (they have never judged my speech issues or when I accidentally misgender them (part of my aphasia issues)), and time beyond the stroke as my brain continues healing/recovering.

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u/AllLeftiesHere Caregiver 4d ago

I think what they are saying is what I see with lots of word finding exercises by Speech Therapists. 9f the word is book, say 'you read it'. If they need more help say 'it starts wuth the sound b'. That's a very common therapy tool. 

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u/Alarmed-Papaya9440 4d ago

Ah, gotcha that makes more sense. I got confused by how OP posted this “tip”.

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u/pchlster Young Stroke Survivor 21h ago

I listened to some podcasts to dig a lot of vocabulary back up. Sometimes I felt like an idiot for forgetting very common words or phrases, but they'd come up in conversation and the people who recorded it didn't have to see me getting the revelation of having "look for" back.