Reorganization of language networks in aphasia takes advantage of the facts that (a) the brain is an organ of plasticity, with neuronal changes occurring throughout the life span, including following brain damage; (b) plasticity is highly experience dependent; and (c) as with any learning system, language reorganization involves a synergistic…

Background: Until today, there is no satisfying explanation for why one language may recover worse than another in differential bilingual aphasia. One potential explanation that has been largely unexplored is that differential aphasia is the consequence of a loss of language control rather than a loss of linguistic representations. Language…

Background: SAPS--'Sprachsystematisches Aphasiescreening'--is a novel language-systematic aphasia screening developed for the German language, which already had been positively evaluated. It offers a fast assessment of modality-specific psycholinguistic components at different levels of complexity and the derivation of impairment-based treatment…

Brain damaged participants offer an opportunity to evaluate the cognitive and linguistic processes and make assumptions about how the brain works. Cognitive linguists have been investigating the underlying mechanisms of idiom comprehension to unravel the ongoing debate on hemispheric specialization in figurative language comprehension. The aim of…

A theoretical framework which considers the verbal functions of the brain under a multivariate and comprehensive cognitive model was statistically analyzed. A confirmatory factor analysis was performed to verify whether some recognized aphasia constructs can be hierarchically integrated as latent factors from a homogenously verbal test. The Brief…

Special issue devoted to neurolinguistics and neuropsychology. (VM)

This paper is part of a current dissertation project exploring the relationships between constructs in linguistic theory and pattern of language behavior in aphasic adults. The author feels that linguists have done little enough work in the area of speech pathology yet they have discussed at length the distinction between competence and…

Research is being conducted to determine the factors behind linguistic retardation in children. A first question raised was whether the linguistic system of the deviant child is qualitatively different from that of a normal child. A matching-up of deviant and normal children according to linguistic level suggests that the onset of base syntax may…

This paper describes the results of two studies of auditory processing in child aphasia, and their implication for understanding deviant language development. The term "aphasia" is discussed as it is used to describe adult and child language disorders. A first experiment on the auditory functioning in aphasic and nonaphasic children suggests that…

Studies have indicated that agrammatical aphasics tend to better realize morphemes with a high level of semantic value. A study sought to examine the effect of the variation of the information content of the article on its comprehension by the aphasic. The appropriate and the significant nature of the function words "the" and "a" were varied with…