Background: Discourse analysis procedures are time consuming and impractical in a clinical setting. Critical to clinicians are simple and informative discourse measures that require minimal time and labour to complete. Many studies, however, have overlooked difficulties that clinicians face. We recently developed core lexicon lists for nouns,…

Purpose: Grammatical encoding (GE) is impaired in agrammatic aphasia; however, the nature of such deficits remains unclear. We examined grammatical planning units during real-time sentence production in speakers with agrammatic aphasia and control speakers, testing two competing models of GE. We queried whether speakers with agrammatic aphasia…

Background: Aphasiologists often research, assess and treat linguistic impairment and its consequences for daily life separately. Studies that link the language used by people with aphasia to routine communicative activities may expand the linguistic forms treated as relevant for successful communication by people with aphasia. Previous research…

Verb retrieval difficulties are common in aphasia; however, few successful treatments have been documented (e.g. Conroy, P., Sage, K., & Lambon Ralph, M. A. (2006). Towards theory-driven therapies for aphasic verb impairments: A review of current theory and practice. "Aphasiology", 20, 1159-1185). This study investigated the efficacy of a novel…

This study aims at investigating the production of the Greek modal and negative particles by non-fluent aphasic patients. These particles belong to the highest part of the verb periphrasis, so they are likely to be impaired in non-fluent aphasia, according to some hypotheses about agrammatic language. Moreover, there is an agreement relation…

There are several accounts of why some individuals with post-stroke aphasia experience difficulty in producing morphologically complex verbs. Although a majority of these individuals also produce syntactically flawed utterances, at least two accounts focus on word-level encoding operations. One account proposes a difficulty with rule-governed…

Spoken verb tense use in three groups of Spanish speakers with expressive limitations, namely, children with specific language impairment, bilingual children with first language (L1) (Spanish) attrition and adults with agrammatism, was compared in order to examine the possible impact of conversational tense frequency on expressive production.…

In the past verb retrieval problems were associated primarily with agrammatism and noun retrieval difficulties with fluent aphasia. With regards to fluent aphasia, so far in the literature, three distinct patterns of verb/noun dissociations have been described for individuals with fluent anomic aphasia in languages with different underlying forms;…

Functionally relevant assessment of the language production of speakers with aphasia should include assessment of connected speech production. Despite the ecological validity of everyday conversations, more controlled and monological types of texts may be easier to obtain and analyse in clinical practice. This article discusses some simple…

Semantic short-term memory (STM) patients have a reduced ability to retain semantic information over brief delays but perform well on other semantic tasks; this pattern suggests damage to a dedicated buffer for semantic information. Alternatively, these difficulties may arise from mild disruption to domain-general semantic processes that have…

Dutch speakers with agrammatic Broca's aphasia are known to have problems with the production of finite verbs in main clauses. This performance pattern has been accounted for in terms of the specific syntactic complexity of the Dutch main clause structure, which requires an extra syntactic operation (Verb Second), relative to the basic…

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…

Noun and verb comprehension and production was investigated in two groups of late bilingual, Greek-English speakers: individuals with anomic aphasia and a control group of non-brain injured individuals matched for age and gender. There were no significant differences in verb or noun comprehension between the two groups in either language. However,…

Verb production is notoriously difficult for individuals with Broca's aphasia, both at the word and at the sentence level. An intriguing question is at which level in the speech production these problems arise. The aim of the present study is to identify the functional locus of the impairment that results in verb production deficits in Broca's…

It might sound surprising that Motor Neurone Disease (MND), regarded still by many as the very example of a neurodegenerative disease affecting selectively the motor system and sparing the sensory functions as well as cognition, can have a significant influence on language. In this article we hope to demonstrate that language dysfunction is not…