Notes that prior assumptions that writing requires phonological mediation has been questioned due to the observation that on tasks requiring the production of spoken and written responses on the same naming attempt, some aphasic subjects produce different words. The data suggest that phonological and orthographic word forms can interact. (53…

Idiom comprehension was assessed in 10 aphasic patients with semantic deficits by means of a string-to-picture matching task. Patients were also submitted to an oral explanation of the same idioms, and to a word comprehension task. The stimuli of this last task were the words following the verb in the idioms. Idiom comprehension was severely…

Acquired aphasics and dyslexics with even very profound word reading impairments have been shown to perform relatively well on the lexical decision task (e.g., Buchanan, Hildebrandt, & MacKinnon, 1999), but direct contrasts with unimpaired participant's data is often complicated by extremely long reaction times for patient data. The dissociation…

Language samples of 15 young normal children actively engaged in learning base syntax were compared with samples of 15 linguistically deviant children of a comparable linguistic level. Mean number of morphemes per utterance was used to determine linguistic level. The two groups were matched according to five linguistic levels previously…

Results of a battery of academic and language tests administered to aphasic children and adolescents (N=15) 10 years after onset revealed that the subjects generally performed more poorly than non-brain-injured subjects on the language measures. Academic difficulties were characteristic of the population. Poor performance on arithmetic…

Production of complex sentences was studied in two men with agrammatic aphasia. The influence of training question production (wh)-movement structures on untrained wh-movement structures and on noun phrases (NP)-movement structures was investigated. Results indicate that movement to an argument position, as in NP-movement, is distinct from a…

An aphasic patient is described as one whose poor repetition of sentences and of lists of words contrasts with his or her surprisingly good performance on immediate problem recognition tasks. This result is interpreted as suggesting a distinction between phonological input and output buffers. (41 references) (Author/LB)

This article discusses advances in structural and functional neuroimaging that indicate that, in general, nonfluent aphasias are associated with left pre-rolandic lesions and fluent aphasias occur with left post-rolandic lesions that spare pre-rolandic areas. However, functional neuroimaging studies have also shown that neural dysfunction often…

Investigated the source of agrammatic aphasic patients' difficulty comprehending semantically reversible sentences. Found approximately equal distributions of three distinct patterns. Results conflict with explanations of comprehension failure which state that a single pattern of performance on sentence structures characterizes comprehension of…

Examines semantic errors produced by normal and aphasic speakers on a picture naming test for their phonological similarity to the targets they replace. A second study examines phonological relationships within sets of semantically related words and shows there is no tendency for these words to share phonological characteristics. (35 references)…

This article presents data showing that two of the four forms of neuroplasticity, homologous area adaptation and map extension, are relevant to recovery from aphasia. It discusses factors related to neuroplastic activity during language recovery, including neurophysiological, subject, and environmental treatment variables. (Contains references.)…

This article contrasts aphasic patients' performance of word naming and lexical decision with that of intact college-aged readers. We discuss this contrast within a framework of self-organization; word recognition by aphasic patients is destabilized relative to intact performance. Less stable performance shows itself as an increase in the…

This study examines the on-line processing of sentences with movement using an auditory anomaly detection task (after Boland, Tanenhaus, Garnsey, & Carlson, 1995). Eight agrammatic aphasic participants (four of whom had undergone treatment focused on comprehension and production of filler-gap sentences) and 24 young normal participants listened to…

The subject of this study was a Peruvian child who learned German first and, from the age of 2 years and 10 months, was systematically exposed to Spanish. At the age of 4, he had mastered both German and Spanish to the same degree of phonic, morphological, and syntactic competence. Two weeks after the surgical removal of a brain tumor at 5 years…

The recommended treatment approach for aphasia involves increasing the efficiency of language processing by manipulating the patient's processing of stimuli. Discussed are assessment, identification of the point of processing breakdown, identification of facilitory stimulus parameters, and treatment through stimulus manipulation. Two case studies…