This paper examines the use of gaze as one of a number of connected compensatory adaptations to linguistic impairment by a patient with Broca's aphasia. The examination of the import of gaze withdrawal and return of gaze in the context of self cuing by the patient shows how the patient exploits the complex multifaceted nature of meaning making.…

When mental health clinicians perform mental status examinations, they examine the language patterns of patients because abnormal language patterns, sometimes referred to as language dysfluency, may indicate a thought disorder. Performing such examinations with deaf patients is a far more complex task, especially with traditionally underserved…

Spaced retrieval (SR) has recently been modified to target anomia in persons with aphasia (PWA). It relies on a strict management of the inter-stimulus interval (ISI) where the time between stimulus presentations is doubled or halved based on response accuracy. Although SR is successful in treating anomia, it remains to be studied whether the…

Although deficits in confrontation naming are a common consequence of damage to the language areas of the left cerebral hemisphere, some patients with aphasia show relatively good naming ability. We measured effects of repeated practice on naming latencies for a set of pictured objects by three aphasic patients with near-normal naming ability and…

Gains made by a woman with Broca's aphasia as documented by traditional measures were paralleled by changes in conversation, including increased verbal output and efficiency, and changes in conversation-repair patterns. The progress documented with conversational discourse analysis was not observable from other test measures. (Author/DB)

Develops the distinction between "referential" and "modalizing" aspects of language and describes their functional dissociation, as observed in various manifestations of aphasia and in the speech of hemispherectomy and commissurotomy patients. (Author/JL)

Aphasia is a total or partial loss of the ability to produce or understand language, usually caused by brain disease or injury. In this case study, the aphasic patient (BMW) has a profound impairment of oral production and a very moderate impairment in comprehension. Several years of informal observation lead to the current study that contrasts…

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…

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,…

Reviews research indicating linguistic knowledge is not innate, that the infant brain is highly differentiated at birth, that processing biases that lead to the "standard brain plan" are innate and localized but not specific to language, and that the infant brain is highly plastic, permitting alternative "brain plans." (Author/CR)

This study evaluated the omission patterns of case markers in the spontaneous speech of 12 Dutch and German adult speakers with agrammatic aphasia within the framework of Chomsky's case theory. Data supported the hypothesis that, if no case assigner is produced, the noun will receive nominative case by default or the case-marking morpheme will be…

This study, with five adults diagnosed with Broca's aphasia with agrammatism, evaluated the acquisition and generalization of complex-sentence production using Linguistic Specific Treatment (LST) and the utility of syntactic theory in evaluating treatment effects. The study's findings support the use of LST, which applies syntactic theory to…

Research indicates that attentional deficits exist in aphasic individuals. However, relatively little is known about auditory vigilance performance in individuals with aphasia. The current study explores reaction time (RT) and accuracy in 10 aphasic participants and 10 nonbrain-damaged controls during linguistic and nonlinguistic auditory…

Temporal control has often been suspected to be a critical factor in intonation production. In particular, disturbance in the production of fundamental frequency (F0) associated with intonation in patients with aphasia has been attributed to a primary underlying deficit in speech timing. The present study examined the speech timing abilities of…

This study describes the linguistic and neuropsychological findings in three right-handed patients with crossed conduction aphasia. Despite the location of the lesion in the right hemisphere, all patients displayed a combination of linguistic deficits typically found in conduction aphasia following analogous damage to the left hemisphere.…