Purpose: Following the Rehabilitation Treatment Specification System (RTSS) framework, the current study investigated the active ingredients in the modified semantic feature analysis (mSFA) targeting either noun or verb retrieval in Mandarin-English bilingual adults with aphasia (BWA). Method: Twelve Mandarin-English BWA completed mSFA treatment…

Background: Patients with anomic aphasia experience difficulties in narrative processing. General discourse measures are time consuming and require necessary skills. Core lexicon analysis has been proposed as an effort-saving approach but has not been developed in Mandarin discourse. Aims: This exploratory study was aimed (1) to apply core lexicon…

Background: Discourse analysis procedures are time consuming and impractical in a clinical setting. Critical to clinicians are simple and informative discourse measures that require minimal time and labour to complete. Many studies, however, have overlooked difficulties that clinicians face. We recently developed core lexicon lists for nouns,…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to review treatment studies of semantic feature analysis (SFA) for persons with aphasia. The review documents how SFA is used, appraises the quality of the included studies, and evaluates the efficacy of SFA. Method: The following electronic databases were systematically searched (last search February 2017):…

Purpose: The present study tested whether (and how) language treatment changed online sentence processing in individuals with aphasia. Method: Participants with aphasia (n = 10) received a 12-week program of Treatment of Underlying Forms (Thompson & Shapiro, 2005) focused on production and comprehension of passive sentences. Before and after…

Purpose: The ultimate goal of aphasia therapy should be to achieve gains in function that generalize to untrained exemplars and daily conversation. Anomia is one of the most disabling features of aphasia. The predominantly lexical/semantic approaches used to treat anomia have low potential for generalization due to the orthogonality of semantic…

Purpose: Cognitive effort is a clinically important facet of linguistic processing that is often overlooked in the assessment and treatment of people with aphasia (PWA). Furthermore, there is a paucity of valid ways to index cognitive effort in PWA. The construct of cognitive effort has been indexed for decades via pupillometry (measurement of…

Purpose: Grammatical encoding (GE) is impaired in agrammatic aphasia; however, the nature of such deficits remains unclear. We examined grammatical planning units during real-time sentence production in speakers with agrammatic aphasia and control speakers, testing two competing models of GE. We queried whether speakers with agrammatic aphasia…

Background: Capturing evidence of the effects of therapy within everyday communication is the holy grail of aphasia treatment design and evaluation. Whilst impaired sentence production is a predominant symptom of Broca's-type aphasia, the effects of sentence production therapy on everyday conversation have not been investigated. Given the…

Purpose: This study examines 3 hypotheses about the processing of "wh"-questions in both neurologically healthy adults and adults with Broca's aphasia. Method: We used an eye tracking while listening method with 32 unimpaired participants (Experiment 1) and 8 participants with Broca's aphasia (Experiment 2). Accuracy, response time, and…

This article examines Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST), a relatively new treatment approach for anomia in people with aphasia. The VNeST protocol aims to promote generalization to increased lexical retrieval of untrained words across a hierarchy of linguistic tasks, including single-word naming of nouns and verbs, sentence production,…

Compounds are words that are made up of at least two other words (lexemes), featuring lexical and syntactic characteristics and thus particularly interesting for the study of language processing. Most studies of compounds and language processing have been based on data from experimental single word production and comprehension tasks. To enhance…

Background: Previous studies of therapy for acquired anomia have treated nouns in isolation. The effect on nouns in connected speech remains unclear. In a recent study in 2012, we used a novel noun syntax therapy and found an increase in the number of determiner plus noun constructions in narrative after therapy. Aims: Two aims arose from the…

This dissertation is an analysis of two types of nominal compounds in Turkish, primary compounds and synthetic compounds within the framework of Distributed Morphology. A nominal primary compound is formed by two nouns, and its meaning is largely determined by world knowledge. A synthetic compound, on the other hand, is formed by a noun and a…

Background: In recent years there has been significant interest in the differential processing of nouns and verbs in people with aphasia, but more limited consideration about whether the differences have implications for therapy. It remains unclear whether verbs can be treated in a similar way to nouns or should be treated using approaches that…