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…

Purpose: This study investigated conflict adaptation in aphasia, specifically whether upregulating cognitive control improves sentence comprehension. Method: Four individuals with mild aphasia completed four eye tracking sessions with interleaved auditory Stroop and sentence-to-picture matching trials (critical and filler sentences). Auditory…

Purpose: This meta-analysis synthesizes published studies using "treatment of underlying forms" (TUF) for sentence-level deficits in people with aphasia (PWA). The study aims were to examine group-level evidence for TUF efficacy, to characterize the effects of treatment-related variables (sentence structural family and complexity;…

Background: The comprehension profile of people with agrammatism is a debated topic. Syntactic complexity and cognitive resources, in particular phonological short-term memory (pSTM), are considered as crucial components by different interpretative accounts. Aim: To investigate the interaction of syntactic complexity and of pSTM in sentence…

Purpose: Analysis of spontaneous speech samples is important for determining patterns of language production in people with aphasia. To accomplish this, researchers and clinicians can use either hand coding or computer-automated methods. In a comparison of the two methods using the hand-coding NNLA (Northwestern Narrative Language Analysis) and…

Purpose: Lexical processing impairments such as delayed and reduced activation of lexical-semantic information have been linked to syntactic processing disruptions and sentence comprehension deficits in individuals with aphasia (IWAs). Lexical-level deficits can also preclude successful lexical encoding during sentence processing and amplify the…

Purpose: Insights from linguistic variation research illustrate a linguistically diverse population, in which even speakers who can be classified as speaking a "mainstream" variety have grammatical knowledge of vernacular or "nonmainstream" features. However, there is a gap in our knowledge regarding how vernacular features are…

Purpose: Arousal and cognitive effort are relevant yet often overlooked components of attention during language processing. Pupillometry can be used to provide a psychophysiological index of arousal and cognitive effort. Given that much is unknown regarding the relationship between cognition and language deficits seen in people with aphasia (PWA),…

Purpose: Persons with aphasia (PWAs) have been shown to have impaired attention skills that may interfere with their ability to successfully participate in speech and language therapy. Fluctuations in attention can be detected using physiological measures such as electroencephalography (EEG), but these measures can be impractical for clinical use.…

Purpose: Earlier investigations based on word and sentence repetition tasks had revealed that the most prevalent metrical pattern in German (the trochee)--unlike the iambic pattern--facilitates articulation in patients with apraxia of speech (AOS; e.g., Aichert, Späth, & Ziegler, 2016), confirming that segmental and prosodic aspects of speech…

Purpose: Script training is a well-established treatment for aphasia, but its evidence comes almost exclusively from monolingual English speakers with aphasia. Furthermore, its active ingredients and profiles of people with aphasia (PWA) that respond to this treatment remain understudied. This study aimed to adapt a scripted-sentence learning…

Background: Given the integral role that verbs play in sentence production, understanding verb deficits is critical to clinical practice. Difficulties in sentence production are often directly related to an inability to retrieve argument structure information which, according to most theoretical accounts, is specified at a lexical level as part of…

Reorganization of language networks in aphasia takes advantage of the facts that (a) the brain is an organ of plasticity, with neuronal changes occurring throughout the life span, including following brain damage; (b) plasticity is highly experience dependent; and (c) as with any learning system, language reorganization involves a synergistic…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to compare the outcomes of the manually coded Northwestern Narrative Language Analysis (NNLA) system, which was developed for characterizing agrammatic production patterns, and the automated Computerized Language Analysis (CLAN) system, which has recently been adopted to analyze speech samples of individuals…

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…