Gerald C. Imaezue, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders and Director of the Brain and Aphasia Recovery Lab, recently delivered an invited two-hour clinical training at OhioHealth in Columbus, Ohio, one of the nation's leading nonprofit health systems.
The training, "Aphasia Care for Linguistically Diverse Patients," equipped expert clinicians with evidence-based frameworks for delivering high-quality aphasia rehabilitation to patients whose primary language is not English — a critical and underserved gap. The session introduced Imaezue's mechanism-first rehabilitation framework, which reorients clinical decision-making toward universal cognitive and learning mechanisms that generalize across languages, and covered culturally responsive assessment workflows, interpreter-mediated procedures, and response accessibility principles.
Central to the training was Recursive Self-Feedback (RSF), a self-referential treatment approach developed and validated through Imaezue's research program in which patients improve their spoken language production through recursive exposure to playbacks of their own speech, without requiring clinician-patient language matching. Drawing on his published body of work, he presented evidence that RSF improves speaking fluency in chronic nonfluent aphasia and enables target language recovery in bilingual aphasia.
The training reflects the broader translational mission of the Brain and Aphasia Recovery Lab at the ÌÇÐÄVlog to advance language-agnostic care for neurogenic communication disorders.