Background: Information from speech and gesture is often integrated to comprehend a message. This integration process requires the appropriate allocation of cognitive resources to both the gesture and speech modalities. People with aphasia are likely to find integration of gesture and speech difficult. This is due to a reduction in cognitive…

Background: Discourse in adults with aphasia is increasingly the focus of assessment and therapy research. A broad range of measures is available to describe discourse, but very limited information is available on their psychometric properties. As a result, the quality of these measures is unknown, and there is very little evidence to motivate the…

Background: Discourse is fundamental to everyday communication, and is an increasing focus of clinical assessment, intervention and research. Aphasia can affect the information a speaker communicates in discourse. Little is known about the psychometrics of the tools for measuring information in discourse, which means it is unclear whether these…

Purpose: In this study, the authors investigated whether gesture, naming, and strategic treatment improved the communication skills of 14 people with severe aphasia. Method: All participants received 15 hr of gesture and naming treatment (reported in a companion article [Marshall et al., 2012]). Half the group received a further 15 hr of strategic…

Purpose: In this study, the authors (a) investigated whether a group of people with severe aphasia could learn a vocabulary of pantomime gestures through therapy and (b) compared their learning of gestures with their learning of words. The authors also examined whether gesture therapy cued word production and whether naming therapy cued gestures.…

Background: Spatial communication consists of both verbal spatial language and gesture. There has been minimal research investigating the use of spatial communication, and even less focussing on people with aphasia. Aims: The aims of this exploratory study were to describe the frequency and variability of spatial language and gesture use by three…

Background: In order to comprehend fully a speaker's intention in everyday communication, information is integrated from multiple sources, including gesture and speech. There are no published studies that have explored the impact of aphasia on iconic co-speech gesture and speech integration. Aims: To explore the impact of aphasia on co-speech…