Aphasia implies the loss or impairment of language caused by brain damage. The key to understanding the nature of aphasic symptoms is the neuro-anatomical site of brain damage, and not the causative agent. However, because "Herpes simplex" virus (HSV) encephalitis infection usually affects the frontal and temporal lobes, subcortical…

Language disorders in children are one of the most frequent causes of difficulties in communication, social interaction, learning and academic achievement. It has been estimated that over 5% of children present with some kind of language disorder. This volume illustrates the state of the art in neurogenic language disorders in children. The most…

The functional architecture of the verbal processing resource system was studied by testing aphasic patients in Canada and Boston for their abilities to use syntactic structure in sentence comprehension in isolation and under dual-task conditions. Results indicate that the processing resource system underlying syntactic processing is separate from…

This article presents the case study of a cooperative Web-learning environment--SOCRATES--to foster barrier-free learning on the Web. While the growth of the Internet was exponential in the last years, still many communities don't benefit from Web-learning technology due to improper tools and constricted communication processes. These problems…

Spoken narratives as a genre usually show literary stylistic features. Written/literary registers are characterized by lexical density whereas spoken/colloquial genres are characterized by the complex combination of simple clauses into clause complexes. It has been observed that when aiming at informationally dense speech, people often hesitate…

This book examines how the brain enables people to speak creatively and build up an understanding of language. The discussion looks at the linguistic and neuro-anatomical underpinnings of language and considers how language skills can systematically break down in individuals with different types of brain damage. By studying children with language…

This paper describes the effect of supplementary multimedia instruction on the pattern of growth of student learning of normal swallowing. On four occasions, up to 190 speech pathology students from four Australian universities completed a free-response task designed to assess students' learning of core information. Scripts were scored using a…

Spoken and written stories of healthy, monolingual speakers of Finnish were compared with spoken stories of aphasic subjects in order to determine in which respects narratives differed from one another. The comparison sheds light on the factors behind stylistic variation in speech and writing. Sixty stories were elicited by presenting a series of…

Two studies of adult aphasia, focusing on phonological disturbances, are presented. In the first study, subjects were 15 adults wit moderate aphasia and five age-matched controls. A variety of speech production and speech perception tests were administered, including tests of syllable discrimination, auditive word-picture matching, articulation,…

Connected speech of 134 healthy, Canadian French-speaking adults, grouped according to age and education level, was analyzed using an aphasia battery. Results demonstrated that older subjects with less education produced fewer content units and were less efficient in transmitting lexico-semantic information. Effects of age and education level on…

This guide is intended to assist individuals (including therapists, relatives and friends, and volunteer and paid tutors) who are attempting to help adults relearn communication skills lost through stroke or accident. The first section examines dysphasia and the needs of dysphasics in an attempt to help the layperson understand the causes of…

Explores the attrition of different aspects of Swedish grammar. Empirical data from bilingual expatriate students are compared to data from monolingual Swedish aphasic patients. The students' noun phrase morphology had undergone attrition, but not their word order. For the aphasics, word order attrition was combined with unaffected noun phrase…

The nature of research on speech communication in asymmetrical interactions, such as those between a speech therapist and patient, is discussed and some general approaches to therapy are noted. The situation of the aphasic is then considered, in which intervention is particularly difficult due to the lack of some important aspects of interpersonal…

The report presents information from a survey of the needs and characteristics of children with severe communication disorders in Ontario and the programs available to serve them. It is explained that information was gathered from structured interviews with principals, teachers, and 28 parents of language handicapped children, as well as visits to…

Separate experiments investigated parietal lobe malfunction; developmental v acquired dyslexia; whole-word, syllabic, and alphabetical reading ability; phonological recoding; and spelling. Reading processes and memory of normal and aphasic children were compared. (CP)