Developing a Web-Based Stimulus Selection Hub for Anomia Treatment Using R and Shiny
Date:
Anomia, or word retrieval difficulty, is ubiquitous across all aphasia diagnoses, and treatment for anomia remains a staple in clinical practice for persons with aphasia. In order to address the role of stimulus properties on treatment outcomes, it is imperative that researchers and clinicians have available the necessary word-level data (e.g., lexical frequency, age-of-acquisition, typicality, etc.). While there are many openly available resources to obtain these psycholinguistic properties of words, it often remains burdensome to collect all the necessary variables, and many times the words vary from database to database, leading to difficulty finding a common set of stimuli. Furthermore, it can be difficult to determine what might be appropriate related and unrelated generalization words for person-specific treatment targets. The aim of this study was to develop a web-based tool that could be used by clinicians and researchers to obtain a variety of commonly used psycholinguistic properties of words. This would provide a one-stop-shop approach for users, particularly those who may not have the coding and data scraping skills or the time available for data extraction and comparison.