The current trend of the WHO that suggests that aphasia assessment and intervention strategies should be directly influenced by outcome goals related to life participation is presented.

The article discusses how adult learning theory can contribute to the success of life participation approaches to aphasia (LPAA) approach to treatment.

Aphasia is an acquired language impairment that affects over 1 million individuals, the majority of whom are over age 65 (Groher, 1989). This disorder has typically been conceptualized within a cognitive neuroscience framework, but a behavioral interpretation of aphasia is also possible. Skinner's (1957) analysis of verbal behavior proposes a…

This article presents the development and piloting of a mediated discourse elicitation protocol. Grounded in situated theories of communication and informed by mediated discourse analysis, this protocol selectively samples familiar discourse types in a manner designed to preserve interactional aspects of communication. Critically, the mediated…

The article discusses the research evidence for the speech language and psychosocial benefits of conversationally based aphasia groups like building interpersonal relationships.

Lexical access in language production, and particularly pathologies of lexical access, are often investigated by examining errors in picture naming and word repetition. In this article, we test a computational approach to lexical access, the two-step interactive model, by examining whether the model can quantitatively predict the repetition-error…

The article presents how speech-language pathologists (SLPs) can use coaching to help individuals take up their normal lifestyle after stroke by understanding counseling and coaching.

Many facts about aphasic and nonaphasic naming are explained by models that use spreading activation to map from the semantics of a word to its phonology. The implemented model of picture naming discussed here achieves this by coupling interactive feedback with two selection steps. The model's structure and default parameters were set up to match…

Bilateral vascular thalamic lesions are rare. Although a variety of neurobehavioral manifestations have been described, the literature is less documented with regard to accompanying linguistic disturbances. This article presents an in-depth neurolinguistic analysis of the language symptoms of a patient who incurred bilateral paramedian ischemic…

This paper discusses the use of single subject controlled experimental designs for investigating the effects of treatment for aphasia. A brief historical perspective is presented, followed by discussions of the advantages and disadvantages of single subject and group approaches, the basic requirements of single subject experimental research, and…

Activation studies in patients with aphasia due to stroke or tumours in the dominant hemisphere have revealed effects of disinhibition in ipsilateral perilesional and in contralateral homotopic cortical regions, referred to as collateral and transcallosal disinhibition. These findings were supported by studies with selective disturbance of…

In a series of experiments, the effect of white noise distortion and talker variation on lexical access in normal and Broca's aphasic participants was examined using an auditory lexical decision paradigm. Masking the prime stimulus in white noise resulted in reduced semantic priming for both groups, indicating that lexical access is degraded by…

Describes how Random Boolean Networks can be used to simulate simple lexicons, and shows how some puzzling properties of real lexicons seem to emerge spontaneously in these models. Describes simple simulations of bilingual aphasia, and shows that a range of recovery patterns can be observed in these simulations. (Author/VWL)

The aim of this study is to develop a partial theory of phonological paraphasias which has some cross-syndrome and cross-linguistic validity. It is based on the distinction between content and structural units and emphasizes the role of the latter. The notion of structure holds the key to an understanding of the differences among the following…

B. Rapp and M. Goldrick (2000) claimed that the lexical and mixed error biases in picture naming by aphasic and nonaphasic speakers argue against models that assume a feedforward-only relationship between lexical items and their sounds in spoken word production. The author contests this claim by showing that a feedforward-only model like WEAVER++…