Previous studies have used semantic verb categories to compare how speakers with and without aphasia use verb types during narrative monologue discourse tasks. In this study, we explore the types of verbs used by speakers with and without aphasia during conversation. Using previously collected conversational discourse samples produced by 23 adults…

Aphasia therapy should address communication in everyday contexts. One type of social interaction that occurs frequently in the daily lives of spouses is joint decision-making. Currently, no known study has investigated how spouses collaboratively make decisions when one of the spouses has aphasia and the other one does not. The purpose of this…

Background: Aphasia impacts communication and relationships. While counselling is increasingly recognised as a component of the speech-language therapy role, the success of conversation partner training is typically measured in terms of communication alone. This scoping review aimed to describe how successful conversation is currently measured…

Background: Pictures drawn by people with aphasia (PWA) are often more challenging to understand than those drawn by healthy people. There are two types of objects: those that tend to be drawn symbolically (symbolically drawn objects--SOs) and those that are likely to be drawn realistically (realistically drawn objects--ROs). Aims: To compare the…

Friendship is an essential component of quality of life. The ongoing lifestyle changes and strain typically experienced by care partners of people with aphasia (PWA) can impact their social network, with friendships being particularly vulnerable to change. This study aimed to understand the impact of caregiving on care partners' friendships over…

People with aphasia may produce speech errors or pauses during speaking turns. A communication partner may choose to guess the person's intended meaning, or may allow the person time to repair their turns (i.e., edited turns). The aim of this study was to understand the topic-related effects that occur when speakers without aphasia allow their…

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: Global aphasia is a severe communication disorder affecting all language modalities, commonly caused by stroke. Evidence as to whether the functional communication of people with global aphasia (PwGA) can improve after speech and language therapy (SLT) is limited and conflicting. This is partly because cognition, which is relevant to…

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…

Purpose: Individuals with aphasia identify discourse-level communication (i.e., language in use) as a high priority for treatment. The central premise of most aphasia treatments is that restoring language at the phoneme, word, and/or sentence level will generalize to discourse. However, treatment-related changes in discourse-level communication…

Background: Meaningful, varied, joyful conversation is an important therapy target for adults with language or cognitive-communication disorders following acquired brain injury (ABI). However, the complexity of daily communication is often reduced to component parts within intervention programmes, with mixed evidence of generalization to everyday…

Purpose: Neurogenic speech and language disorders--such as acquired apraxia of speech (AOS) and aphasia with phonemic paraphasia (APP)--are often misdiagnosed due to similarities in clinical presentation. Word syllable duration (WSD)--a measure of average syllable length in multisyllabic words--serves as a proxy for speech rate, which is an…

Purpose: Limited research exists assessing speech perception in school-age children with speech sound disorder (SSD) and childhood apraxia of speech (CAS); despite early evidence that speech perception may lead to error-prone motor planning/programming. In this study, we examine speech perception performance in school-age children with and without…

Background: People with aphasia (PWA) frequently experience difficulties in understanding longer written content such as paragraphs or books. Reading strategies are a promising approach to treat text-level reading comprehension deficits in PWA. Nevertheless, empirical evidence for their efficacy remains rare. Aims: The primary objective of this…

Purpose: To date, there are no automated tools for the identification and fine-grained classification of paraphasias within discourse, the production of which is the hallmark characteristic of most people with aphasia (PWA). In this work, we fine-tune a large language model (LLM) to automatically predict paraphasia targets in Cinderella story…