Purpose: Persons with aphasia (PWA) experience differences in attention after stroke, potentially impacting cognitive/language performance. This secondary analysis investigated physiologically measured vigilant attention during linguistic and nonlinguistic processing in PWA and control participants. Method: To evaluate performance and attention in…

Purpose: This research note reports on an unexpected negative finding related to behavior change in a controlled trial designed to test whether partner training improves the conversational skills of volunteers. Method: The clinical trial involving training in "Supported Conversation for Adults with Aphasia" utilized a single-blind,…

Children have been reported to prefer the surface scope or "isomorphic" reading of scopally ambiguous sentences (Musolino 1998, among others). Existing accounts in the literature differ with respect to the proposed source of this "isomorphism effect." Some accounts are based on learnability considerations (e.g., Moscati &…

Background: Stroke is currently the leading cause of long-term disability in adults in the United States. There is a need for accessible, low-cost treatments of stroke-related disabilities such as aphasia. Aims: To explore an intervention for aphasia utilizing mindfulness meditation (MM). This preliminary study examines the feasibility of teaching…

Background: Aphasia is an acquired language disorder that occurs secondary to brain injury, such as stroke. It causes communication difficulties that have a significant impact on quality of life and social relationships. Although the efficacy of speech-language therapy has been clearly demonstrated in this population, long-term services are…

The current study aimed to use electromagnetic articulography (EMA) to investigate the effect of increasing word length on lingual kinematics in acquired apraxia of speech (AOS). Tongue-tip and tongue-back movement was recorded for five speakers with AOS and a concomitant aphasia (mean age = 53.6 years; SD = 12.60) during target consonant…

Agrammatism is a frequent sequela of Broca's aphasia that manifests itself in omission and/or substitution of the grammatical morphemes in spontaneous and constrained speech. The hierarchical structure of syntactic trees has been proposed as an account for difficulty across grammatical morphemes (e.g., tense, agreement, and negation). Supporting…

Purpose: In this study, the authors explore a method of measuring physiologic and perceived stress in individuals with aphasia by investigating salivary cortisol reactivity and subjectively perceived stress in response to a standardized linguistic task. Method: Fifteen individuals with aphasia and 15 age-matched healthy controls participated in a…

Processing abilities in aphasia, and the nature of processing breakdowns, were the focuses of this investigation. Individuals with either fluent or nonfluent aphasia, plus a control group, participated in a cross-modal lexical priming task designed to elicit priming effects when activation of inference interpretations occurred. Comprehension of…