Aphasia as a multifaceted language disorder associated with the complicated links between language and brain has been and is of interest and significance to the stream of research in different disciplines including neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive studies and language acquisition. Along with explorations into the manifestations of…

Dysphagia is the clinical expression of disruption of the synchronized activity surrounding the normal swallowing mechanism. It results from a large number of causes including neurologic, myopathic, metabolic, inflammatory/autoimmune, infectious, structural, iatrogenic, and psychiatric diseases. It can have a significant impact on social and…

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…

Clinical Question: For people with aphasia following a stroke, is group therapy shown to be more effective on communication outcome measures reflecting impairment, activity, and/or participation than individual therapy or no therapy? Method: Review of treatment efficacy research for group intervention in aphasia Study Sources: Cochrane Database of…

Repetition is a central phenomenon of behavior, and researchers have made extensive use of it to illuminate psychological functioning. In the language sciences, a ubiquitous form of such repetition is "structural priming," a tendency to repeat or better process a current sentence because of its structural similarity to a previously experienced…

Pharmacotherapy of aphasia had been discussed for the last twenty years with first bromocriptine and amphetamine and then serotoninergic, GABAergic and cholinergic agents. Here, we reviewed the MEDLINE available reports of drug therapy for aphasia. So far, proofs of efficiency were found indubitable for none of the studied molecules. However, some…

The article compares normal language comprehension with that in aphasic patients in terms of both sentence and discourse comprehension. Implications for treatment of aphasic patients include emphasizing comprehension of main ideas, rather than details, and using materials with high imagery and personal relevance. (DB)

Fifteen years ago, Pascual-Leone and colleagues used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to investigate speech production in pre-surgical epilepsy patients and in doing so, introduced a novel tool into language research. TMS can be used to non-invasively stimulate a specific cortical region and transiently disrupt information processing. These…

The literature review looks at effectiveness of language treatment for aphasic patients in terms of complications in treatment studies (differences among patients and spontaneous recoveries), and results of treatment studies suggesting that treatment usually benefits only patients who meet specific criteria (such as aphasia of less than 3 months…

Summarizes and evaluates research on aphasia, and indicates problem areas that must be studied. (52 references) (CFM)

The paper surveys contribution of A. Luria to aphasiology, emphasizing unique extent to which he integrated theory and therapeutic practice. Luria's view of primary defects underlying main forms of aphasia is summarized; this is followed by brief account of his application of certain notions of structural linguists, including R. Jakobson's…

This paper introduces the Government-Binding Theory of grammar and offers examples of the theory's use in areas of language development, child language disorders, and adult aphasia. Discussed are the levels of representation of Universal Grammar, subtheories that constrain the representations at each level, parameter setting, core grammar, and…

The present case continues the series of anomia treatment studies with contextual priming (CP), being the second in-depth treatment study conducted for an individual suffering from semantically based anomia. Our aim was to acquire further evidence of the facilitation and interference effects of the CP treatment on semantic anomia. Based on the…

The goal of all speech rehabilitation methods is the restoration of speech as a unitary higher function. One approach views speech as a complex but coherent system where all levels and components are interconnected. This view takes into consideration the use of verbal communication, which takes place at a higher speech level and includes activity,…

The justification for Kean's (EJ 165 107) analysis of agrammatism as a phonological disorder rests on a certain specific theory of the structure of human language faculty, which is summarized. Simply proposing a competing analysis based on a distinct theory does not falsify the hypotheses. However, Kean's claims are subject to empirical…