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…

Background: Communication disabilities, such as primary progressive aphasia (PPA), impact family members as well as the individuals with the condition. To provide adequate communication care to people with PPA (PwPPA) and their family members, it is crucial to understand the communication needs from the family members' perspectives. To date,…

Background: The semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is typically associated with a loss of semantic knowledge. Research on the semantic processing in the other clinical variants of PPA is, however, rather sparse and limited to off-line behavioural studies. Aims: This study aimed to investigate verbal semantic processing in…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to review treatment studies of semantic feature analysis (SFA) for persons with aphasia. The review documents how SFA is used, appraises the quality of the included studies, and evaluates the efficacy of SFA. Method: The following electronic databases were systematically searched (last search February 2017):…

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 & Aims: This study ran within the framework of the Thales Aphasia Project that investigated the efficacy of elaborated semantic feature analysis (ESFA). We evaluated the treatment integrity (TI) of ESFA, i.e., the degree to which therapists implemented treatment as intended by the treatment protocol, in two different formats:…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to determine if a tablet-based home practice program with weekly telepractice support could enable long-term maintenance of recent treatment gains and foster new language gains in poststroke aphasia. Method: In a pre-post group study of home practice outcomes, 21 individuals with chronic aphasia were examined…

This post hoc study investigated coverbal gesture patterns in two persons with chronic Wernicke's aphasia. They had both received therapy focusing on multimodal communication therapy, and their pre- and post-therapy verbal and gestural skills in face-to-face conversational interaction with their speech therapist were analysed by administering a…

The aim of the study was to compare approaches highlighting either semantic or phonological features to treat naming deficits in aphasia. Treatment focused on improving picture naming. An alternating treatments design was used with a multiple baseline design across stimuli to examine effects of both approaches in two participants with varying…

Current research on bilingual aphasia highlights the paucity in recommendations for optimal rehabilitation for bilingual aphasic patients (Edmonds & Kiran, 2006; Roberts & Kiran, 2007). In this paper, we have developed a computational model to simulate an English-Spanish bilingual language system in which language representations can vary by age…

Producing a sentence involves encoding a preverbal message into a grammatical structure by retrieving lexical items and integrating them into a functional (semantic-to-grammatical) structure. Individuals with agrammatism are impaired in this grammatical encoding process. However, it is unclear what aspect of grammatical encoding is impaired and…

Several studies have reported improved naming using the semantic feature analysis (SFA) approach in individuals with aphasia. Whether the SFA can be modified and still produce naming improvements in aphasia is unknown. The present study was designed to address this question by using a modified version of the SFA approach. Three, rather than the…

The pervasiveness of word-finding difficulties in aphasia has motivated several theories regarding management of the deficit and its effectiveness. Recently, the hypothesis was advanced that instead of simply accompanying speech gestures participate in language production by increasing the semantic activation of words grounded in sensory-motor…

The article proposes a reeducation program for conduction aphasics with reproductive difficulties. Program characteristics include analysis and manipulation of visual stimuli (written words and syllables), suppression of the compensation effect of the spared lexical-semantic system; and progressive increase in length and complexity of phonological…

Drawing in aphasia therapy has been used predominately as a substitution for speech or to augment communication when other modalities are non-functional. The value of drawing as a route for facilitating verbal expression has not been a focus of prior research. We compared the usefulness of drawing and writing as compensatory strategies for…