Melodic Intonation Therapy: The Ingredients That Make It Work

Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT) is a prominent music-based treatment for people with nonfluent aphasia that has numerous potentially active treatment ingredients. These include a simplified, predictable rhythm, slow rate, and unison production of spoken language. Evidence supports the effectiveness of MIT for improving repetition ability but is more modest regarding improvements in functional communication. This chapter reviews MIT’s treatment ingredients, including how they are used and how they are thought to work. With these numerous ingredients, MIT is flexible and can be customized for a particular individual’s needs, but group- level studies using standardized treatment protocols may not allow for this. A treatment taxonomy specifying treatment targets, ingredients, and mechanisms of action is a promising tool to organize the existing evidence, further investigate MIT, and implement it in clinical practice. This approach will allow for a balance between customization and standardization of the treatment protocol.