Background: Conversation therapy for aphasia is a complex intervention comprising multiple components and targeting multiple outcomes. UK Medical Research Council (MRC) guidelines published in 2008 recommend that in addition to measuring the outcomes of complex interventions, evaluation should seek to clarify how such outcomes are produced,…

Background & Aims: A recent systematic review of conversation training for communication partners of people with aphasia has shown that it is effective, and improves participation in conversation for people with chronic aphasia. Other research suggests that people with aphasia are better able to learn communication strategies in an environment…

Historically, agrammatism, a symptom of Broca's aphasia, has been associated with dysprosody, on account of speakers' slow, halting, and effortful speech. Almost all investigations of this phenomenon use experimental methods (reading, repetition). Thus, little is known about how prosody is used by speakers with agrammatism and understood by their…

Current approaches to assessing agrammatism use data from restricted contexts, such as picture description and story telling tasks. There is evidence in the conversation analysis literature to suggest that conversational grammar may differ markedly from the grammar of such elicited language samples. The disparity between conversational and test…

Background: Agrammatic speech can manifest in different ways in the same speaker if task demands change. Individual variation is considered to reflect adaptation, driven by psycholinguistic factors such as underlying deficit. Recently, qualitative investigations have begun to show ways in which conversational interaction can influence the form of…