Figure 1.

Schematic overview of the experimental design. Three types of treatment were applied: singing therapy, rhythmic therapy, or standard therapy. In singing therapy, patients underwent training of common, formulaic lyrics by singing them to a well-known melody (“Hello, everything alright? Everything's fine…”). In rhythmic therapy, patients were trained using the same lyrics, but rhythmically spoken with natural prosody. In standard therapy, patients attended speech therapy that did not include singing, rhythmic speech, or training with formulaic phrases. In each treatment group, the production of formulaic lyrics was assessed at different stages of the therapy. Finally, it was explored whether the patients showed a training transfer to the production of unknown, non-formulaic lyrics that were not part of any treatment (“Bright forest, there at the boat, thin like oak…”).