Purpose: Individuals with primary progressive apraxia of speech (PPAOS) have apraxia of speech (AOS) in which disruptions in articulation or prosody predominate the speech pattern, referred to, respectively, as phonetic or prosodic subtypes. Many develop aphasia and/or dysarthria. Past research has demonstrated that simple temporal acoustic…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to develop and pilot a novel treatment framework called "BEARS" (Balancing Effort, Accuracy, and Response Speed). People with aphasia (PWA) have been shown to maladaptively balance speed and accuracy during language tasks. BEARS is designed to train PWA to balance speed-accuracy trade-offs and…

Background: Every language has certain specific idiosyncrasies in its writing system. Cross-linguistic analyses of alexias and agraphias are fundamental to understand commonalities and differences in the brain organization of written language. Few reports of alexias and agraphias in the Spanish language are currently available. Aims: To analyse…

Studies investigating voicing onset time (VOT) production by speakers with aphasia have shown that nonfluent aphasics show a deficit in the articulatory programming of speech sounds based on the range of VOT values produced by aphasic individuals. If the VOT value lies between the normal range of VOT for the voiced and voiceless categories, then…

This study evaluates spelling errors in the three subtypes of primary progressive aphasia (PPA): agrammatic (PPA-G), logopenic (PPA-L), and semantic (PPA-S). Forty-one PPA patients and 36 age-matched healthy controls were administered a test of spelling. The total number of errors and types of errors in spelling to dictation of regular words,…

Semantic errors in aphasia (e.g., naming a horse as "dog") frequently arise from faulty mapping of concepts onto lexical items. A recent study by our group used voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM) methods with 64 patients with chronic aphasia to identify voxels that carry an association with semantic errors. The strongest associations were…

The objective of this research is to provide an improved automated computational tool to study aphasic production. Using the speech production of Italian aphasic patients, the present study demonstrates the possibility of applying an integrated algorithm to automatically assess and generate error patterns typical of aphasic speech. Philological…

Conduction aphasia is a language disorder characterized by frequent speech errors, impaired verbatim repetition, a deficit in phonological short-term memory, and naming difficulties in the presence of otherwise fluent and grammatical speech output. While traditional models of conduction aphasia have typically implicated white matter pathways,…

Patients with semantic dementia show a specific pattern of impairment on both verbal and non-verbal "pre-semantic" tasks, e.g., reading aloud, past tense generation, spelling to dictation, lexical decision, object decision, colour decision and delayed picture copying. All seven tasks are characterised by poorer performance for items that are…

The nature and frequency of speech production errors in neurodegenerative disease have not previously been precisely quantified. In the present study, 16 patients with a progressive form of non-fluent aphasia (PNFA) were asked to tell a story from a wordless children's picture book. Errors in production were classified as either phonemic,…

Within a discrete two-stage model of lexicalization, semantic errors and errors of omission are assumed to be independent events. In contrast, cascading and interactive models allow for an influence of word form on lexical selection and thus for an inherent relationship in accounting for both error types. A group of 17 aphasic patients was…

This paper investigates stress assignment in Dutch aphasic patients in non-word repetition, as well as in real-word and non-word reading. Performance on the non-word reading task was similar for the aphasic patients and the control group, as mainly regular stress was assigned to the targets. However, there were group differences on the real-word…

We report the case of a patient who showed a marked deficit in compound reading after almost complete recovery from his aphasic disturbances. Omission of one of the two compound components was his most frequent type of error. The patient also produced many paraphasias, which always respected the compound structure of the target. Similar errors…

This article contrasts aphasic patients' performance of word naming and lexical decision with that of intact college-aged readers. We discuss this contrast within a framework of self-organization; word recognition by aphasic patients is destabilized relative to intact performance. Less stable performance shows itself as an increase in the…