Patients with conduction aphasia have been characterized as having a short-term memory deficit that leads to relative difficulty on span and repetition tasks. It has also been observed that these same patients often get the gist of what is said to them, even if they are unable to repeat the information verbatim. To study this phenomenon…

Two experiments investigated phonological, derivational-morphological and semantic aspects of grammatical gender assignment in a perception and a production task in German aphasic patients and age-matched controls. The agreement of a gender indicating adjective (feminine, masculine or neuter) and a noun was evaluated during perception in…

Bilateral vascular thalamic lesions are rare. Although a variety of neurobehavioral manifestations have been described, the literature is less documented with regard to accompanying linguistic disturbances. This article presents an in-depth neurolinguistic analysis of the language symptoms of a patient who incurred bilateral paramedian ischemic…

Nonaphasic speakers are known to take longer to name pictures when they are blocked by semantic category and repeated multiple times. We replicated this ''semantic blocking effect'' in older controls and showed that in aphasia, the effect is manifested in increased error rates when naming semantically homogeneous, compared to mixed blocks. We…

Individuals with agrammatic aphasia may have difficulty with verb production in comparison to nouns. Additionally, they may have greater difficulty producing verbs that have fewer semantic components (i.e., are semantically "light") compared to verbs that have greater semantic weight. A connectionist verb-production model proposed by Gordon and…

Suggests that many kinds of aphasic errors demonstrate what slips-of-the-tongue do, and that the study of aphasia can shed light on normal language processes. (Author/BK)

In a series of experiments, the effect of white noise distortion and talker variation on lexical access in normal and Broca's aphasic participants was examined using an auditory lexical decision paradigm. Masking the prime stimulus in white noise resulted in reduced semantic priming for both groups, indicating that lexical access is degraded by…

To better characterize fluent and nonfluent variants of primary progressive aphasia (PPA). Although investigators have recognized both fluent and nonfluent patients with PPA (Mesulam, 2001), the clinical and neuroimaging features of these variants have not been fully defined. We present clinical and neuropsychological data on 47 PPA patients…

The main objective of this study is to illustrate how adaptation to linguistic limitations takes place in a specific activity and is affected by factors pertaining to the social activity or the individuals. A man with aphasia is compared to an adult immigrant L2 learner. An argumentative role play was video-recorded, transcribed and analysed. Both…

The effect of semantic grouping on confrontation-naming performances of 16 fluent and 10 nonfluent aphasic adults was examined. Performances were not uniformly facilitated in one naming condition over the other. Some patients, however, did appear to display performance discrepancies between the two conditions. (Author/CL)

The effect of typicality of category exemplars on naming was investigated using a single subject experimental design across participants and behaviors in four patients with fluent aphasia. Patients trained on naming of atypical exemplars demonstrated generalization to naming of intermediate and typical items. However, patients trained on typical…

This study examined the effects that the acoustic-phonetic structure of a stimulus exerts on the processes by which lexical candidates compete for activation. An auditory lexical decision paradigm was used to investigate whether shortening the VOT of an initial voiceless stop consonant in a real word results in the activation of the…

In the present study, a cross-modal semantic priming task was used to investigate the ability of left-hemisphere-damaged (LHD) nonfluent aphasic, right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) and non-brain-damaged (NBD) control subjects to use a discourse context to resolve lexically ambiguous words. Subjects first heard four-sentence discourse passages ending…

This study investigated how normal subjects and Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics integrate thematic information incrementally using syntax, lexical-semantics, and pragmatics in a simple active declarative sentence. Three priming experiments were conducted using an auditory lexical decision task in which subjects made a lexical decision on a…

Purpose: The effect of semantic naming treatment on crosslinguistic generalization was investigated in 3 participants with English-Spanish bilingual aphasia. Method: A single-subject experimental designed was used. Participants received semantic treatment to improve naming of English or Spanish items, while generalization was tested to untrained…