The fast pace and relative ease at which individuals with typical language acquire and use words belie the complexity and vulnerability of lexical representation development (i.e., word learning) and lexical-semantic processing. Lexical-semantic processing impairments are common in both developmental and acquired communication disorders and, even…

Communication is fundamental to the human condition but is impaired in life-altering ways for more than 2.4 million individuals with aphasia in the United States. 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…

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is an acquired neurodegenerative syndrome that has specific and devastating effects on an individual's speech and language ability. Based on a detailed assessment of behavior and cognition, combined with structural neuroimaging data and pathological evidence, PPA is typically classified into three variants: the…

Producing a sentence involves encoding a preverbal message into a grammatical structure by retrieving lexical items and integrating them into a functional (semantic-to-grammatical) structure. Individuals with agrammatism are impaired in this grammatical encoding process. However, it is unclear what aspect of grammatical encoding is impaired and…