Purpose: If language production is impaired, will gestures compensate? Evidence in favor of this prediction has often been argued to come from aphasia, but it remains contested. Here, we tested whether thought content not present in speech due to language impairment is manifested in gestures, in 20 people with dysfluent (Broca's) aphasia, 20…

Background: People with language impairments are at a higher risk of receiving inappropriate or inadequate healthcare, often stemming from ineffective exchanges between patients and healthcare professionals. This study explores a possible factor in such exchanges: the use of collaborative forms of talk in interaction with people with aphasia.…

Background: Factors influencing the implementation of communication partner training (CPT) with familiar partners of people with aphasia (PWA) have previously been documented using disparate approaches. To date there has been no synthesis of these factors using a common theoretical framework. Investigating CPT implementation factors using a common…

Background: Many people with aphasia have word-finding difficulties, with some showing particular difficulties with verbs. Picture-naming therapy is often used to improve naming, but gains are usually limited to therapy items and do not transfer to conversation. Therapy where words are produced in sentences and in real-life activities may be more…

Despite the well documented pragmatic deficits that can arise subsequent to Right Hemisphere Brain Damage (RHBD), few researchers have directly studied everyday conversations involving people with RHBD. In recent years, researchers have begun applying Conversation Analysis (CA) to the everyday talk of people with aphasia. This research programme…

Background: Studies of therapy with people with aphasia tend to use impairment-based and functional measures of outcome. The views of participants are not formally evaluated. Current health and socialcare practice requires intervention to be explicitly client-centred and evidence-based. It is therefore important to investigate the broader effects…

Little evidence-based research has been published within the field of communication disorders on the role of dogs as catalysts for human communication. This single participant study, a point of entry into this realm of research, explores the effects of a therapy dog on the communication skills of a patient with aphasia receiving intensive speech…

A sociolinguistic, semantic analysis of intonation was conducted on a 15-minute natural interaction between an aphasic speaker, his wife, and his neighbor. Findings indicated the neighbor made more use of two dimensions of intonation, specifically pitch movements referring to shared information and marked tones, when addressing the aphasic speaker…

Conversation analysis was used to investigate a conversational partner's strategies when assisting with the word searches of an aphasic person. Analysis of 38 authentic videotaped conversation sequences identified four conversation strategies systematically and collaboratively used: guessing, alternative guessing, completion, and closing…

This study examined how four adults with aphasia collaborated with routine communication partners. Overall, these pairs completed the referencing task trials with accuracy and displayed referencing processes that conformed to the collaborative referencing model of communication. However, the pairs also used diverse verbal and nonverbal resources,…

Thirty-two subjects (5 Broca's, 7 conduction, and 10 anomic aphasics and 10 normal controls) performed story retell and procedural discourse tasks containing familiar and unfamiliar topics, with familiar and unfamiliar listeners. Results indicated that topic familiarity significantly influenced verbal output in both normal and aphasic subjects.…

Seven aphasic and seven normal adults described cartoon drawings and received one of three types of feedback (explicit, false, or implicit). Subjects' recodings showed that normal subjects used more expansion and deletion than aphasics. No significant differences existed between groups for repetition or revision. Subjects' responses varied…

This article provides examples and illustrations of how people with aphasia can and do demonstrate their competence in managing their lives despite chronic aphasia. It discusses a number of ways in which persons with aphasia and their families can learn to live fully despite the intrusion of aphasia. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

Background: One of the most disabling consequences of aphasia is the way it excludes the person from conversation. A number of studies have attempted to tackle this problem by training the conversational partners of aphasic people. This study offers an evaluation of this approach. Aims: Six volunteers were trained in conversing with people with…

Three studies observed everyday communication of people with aphasia, traumatic brain injury, and in hospital. Simplification of real-life communication in the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health, variability of item sampling in existing assessments, and the complexity of real-life…