People who have suffered a stroke or traumatic brain injury often experience aphasia – the loss of ability to understand or express language due to brain damage. One very common complication is known as literal paraphasia, or the mixing up of sound-alike words.

To depict that specific struggle, we brought literal paraphasia to life in dynamic, illustrated posters. These posters serve as therapeutic tools that clinicians can use to help patients improve cognitive skills such as semantic feature analysis, verbal expression, and auditory comprehension.

We wanted all the elements in the poster to be uniquely bold and meticulously crafted to help patients identify them. Every poster is sent with an accompanying worksheet that outlines specific exercises that help patients to distinguish, recognize, remember, and verbalize the various images they see.

For this project, we chose an artist with a very ethereal, painterly approach because we wanted everything to feel stylized and heightened to accentuate how the brain processes words as distinct, iconic images. We used a tongue to represent the very battlefield in which these words fight to get out of the mouth.

Then we created a jumbled, chaotic environment to evoke the tension and anxiety a patient feels trying to say the right one. We placed the target words, “sheep” and “tree,” literally on the tip of the tongue – so very close to being said but not quite there yet. Further down on the tongue are all the objects competing with the sheep or tree, representing other words in English that start with a similar “sh” or “tr” sound.

We gave them a feeling of strenuous movement to illustrate how they are all fighting against each other. We also made sure that the objects are in a color palette that pops against our predominantly magenta background to help patients easily identify them.