Purpose: The impact of stimulus-level psycholinguistic variables and personlevel semantic and phonological processing skills on treatment outcomes in individuals with aphasia requires further examination to inform clinical decision making in treatment prescription and stimuli selection. This study investigated the influence of stimulus-level…

Purpose: Better performance for actions compared to objects has been reported in the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (svPPA). This study investigated the influence of the assessment task (naming, semantic picture matching) over the dissociation between objects and actions. Method: Ten individuals with svPPA and 17 matched controls…

Purpose: Individuals with aphasia often report that they feel able to say words in their heads, regardless of speech output ability. Here, we examine whether these subjective reports of successful "inner speech" (IS) are meaningful and test the hypothesis that they reflect lexical retrieval. Method: Participants were 53 individuals with…

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…

Investigating instances where lexical selection fails can lead to deeper insights into the cognitive machinery and architecture supporting successful word retrieval and speech production. In this paper, we used a multiplex lexical network approach that combines semantic and phonological similarities among words to model the structure of the mental…

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…

Individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia experience difficulty when processing reversible non-canonical sentences. Different accounts have been proposed to explain this phenomenon. The Trace Deletion account (Grodzinsky, 1995, 2000, 2006) attributes this deficit to an impairment in syntactic representations, whereas others (e.g., Caplan,…

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…

Background: Capturing evidence of the effects of therapy within everyday communication is the holy grail of aphasia treatment design and evaluation. Whilst impaired sentence production is a predominant symptom of Broca's-type aphasia, the effects of sentence production therapy on everyday conversation have not been investigated. Given the…

Alignment refers to the interactive use of similar words to accomplish a linguistic and cognitive "common ground" in conversations. Alignment is thought to be unconscious, relying on priming mechanisms. This occurs uniquely in conversational contexts and has been shown in choices of words, grammatical constructions, and even indirect…

Aphasia as a multifaceted language disorder associated with the complicated links between language and brain has been and is of interest and significance to the stream of research in different disciplines including neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive studies and language acquisition. Along with explorations into the manifestations 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…

This study reports on the pattern of performance on spoken and written naming, spelling to dictation, and oral reading of single verbs and nouns in a bilingual speaker with aphasia in two first languages that differ in morphological complexity, orthographic transparency, and script: Greek (L1a) and English (L1b). The results reveal no verb/noun…

Two important research lines in neuro- and psycholinguistics are studying natural or experimentally induced slips of the tongue and investigating the symptom patterns of aphasic individuals. Only few studies have focused on explaining aphasic symptoms by provoking aphasic symptoms in healthy speakers. While all experimental techniques have so far…