Guides

Practical writing for families practising at home

These pages are for the person sitting beside someone with aphasia. They describe what the research has found and how families put it into practice. They are general information, not medical advice, and decisions about care belong with your speech-language pathologist.

• Start here

  What Words at Home is, how to set it up in about five minutes, and how a practice session actually runs. Read this one first.

• Apps for PPA, compared honestly

  An honest comparison of word-practice and communication apps for primary progressive aphasia, including where an established product is the better choice and where none of them fit.

• Coach, not tester

  The one habit that decides whether home practice helps someone with aphasia: give the answer instead of testing for it. Waiting, cueing in order, never quizzing, never correcting, and what to say instead.

• Cueing order for logopenic PPA at home

  What order to offer help in when someone with logopenic variant PPA cannot find a word: untimed attempt, first sound, first letter, written word, spoken model, say it together. Why sound and letter cues come first, when to move on, and why you never say wrong.

• What to do at home after a PPA diagnosis: the first month

  A practical, ordered guide for the first month after a primary progressive aphasia diagnosis: what helps now, what can wait, what to stop doing, how to talk to each other, how to start a daily practice habit, and what to ask the speech-language pathologist.

• How much daily practice actually works

  What the aphasia research says about home-practice dose: 15 minutes a day, 15 to 30 words at a time, and why spaced review holds gains better than extra volume.

• Which PPA variant, and why it changes practice

  The three variants of primary progressive aphasia: semantic, logopenic, and nonfluent/agrammatic. What breaks down in each, why the cue that unlocks a word for one person is the wrong cue for another, and how home practice should differ.

• Practising with your own photos

  Why home practice built from your own photographs and your own recorded voices is different from practice on stock pictures, which photos to choose, and how to pick the first fifteen words.

• Does speech recognition work for aphasic speech?

  Word error rates for Whisper, Azure and Google on aphasic speech, why checking one known word is far easier than transcription, and what accuracy has actually been reported.

• The evidence behind these guides

  Every study these guides rely on, what it found, and a link to the source.