Background: Conversation therapy for aphasia is a complex intervention comprising multiple components and targeting multiple outcomes. UK Medical Research Council (MRC) guidelines published in 2008 recommend that in addition to measuring the outcomes of complex interventions, evaluation should seek to clarify how such outcomes are produced,…

Purpose: Coverbal gesture use, which is affected by the presence and degree of aphasia, can be culturally specific. The purpose of this study was to compare gesture use among Cantonese-speaking individuals: 23 neurologically healthy speakers, 23 speakers with fluent aphasia, and 21 speakers with nonfluent aphasia. Method: Multimedia data of…

The phonomotor treatment program for treating word-retrieval deficits among people with aphasia is inspired by a parallel distributed processing model of lexical processing and is focused at the level of individual phonemes and phoneme sequences. Because verbal production of words involves the translation of a lexical-semantic representation into…

Deaf individuals who use American Sign Language (ASL) are rarely the focus of professionals in speech-language pathology. Although society is widely thought of in terms of those who speak, this norm is not all-inclusive. Many signing individuals exhibit disorders in signed language and need treatment much like their speaking peers. Although there…

Background: Speech-language therapists use counselling to address the psychological well-being of people affected by post-stroke aphasia. Speech-language therapists report low counselling knowledge, skill and confidence for working in post-stroke aphasia which may be related to a lack of counselling training specific to the needs of this client…

Background: The use of standardized tests specifically designed for and normed on bilingual groups is crucial for the accurate diagnosis and language profiling of bilingual speakers with aphasia. Currently, there is a dearth of norms and supporting psychometric data for the few available bilingual aphasia assessments. The only available aphasia…

The statistical information that estimates the magnitude of communication disorders among Egyptian children is scarce. At Mansoura University, a prospective study was performed to identify communication disorders among nursery school children in Dakahlia governorate, Egypt to estimate the problem's size among Arabic-speaking Egyptian children…

Background: Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) describes a heterogeneous group of language-led dementias. People with this type of dementia are increasingly being referred to speech and language therapy (SLT) services. Yet, there is a paucity of research evidence focusing on PPA interventions and little is known about SLT practice in terms of…

Patient-centered care is extending the sphere of health care beyond the patient, focusing attention upon the family caregiver(s). In this context, patient-family relationships are at the center of consistent, well-developed interprofessional interventions that encompass caregiver education, training, and wellness. Cohort models of intervention…

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,…

This dissertation explores how listeners extract meaning from personal and reflexive pronouns in spoken language. To be understood, words like her and herself must be linked to a prior element in the speech stream (or antecedent). This process draws on syntactic knowledge and verbal working memory processes. I present two original research studies…

The purpose of this study was to measure speech-language pathologists' (SLPs) perceptions of fatigue in clients with aphasia and identify strategies used to manage client fatigue during speech and language therapy. SLPs completed a short online survey containing a series of questions related to their perceptions of patient fatigue. Of 312…

Purpose: Cognitive effort is a clinically important facet of linguistic processing that is often overlooked in the assessment and treatment of people with aphasia (PWA). Furthermore, there is a paucity of valid ways to index cognitive effort in PWA. The construct of cognitive effort has been indexed for decades via pupillometry (measurement of…

Purpose: The integrity of selective attention in people with aphasia (PWA) is currently unknown. Selective attention is essential for everyday communication, and inhibition is an important part of selective attention. This study explored components of inhibition--both intentional and reactive inhibition--during spoken-word production in PWA and in…

Background: Aphasia is an acquired language disorder that occurs secondary to brain injury, such as stroke. It causes communication difficulties that have a significant impact on quality of life and social relationships. Although the efficacy of speech-language therapy has been clearly demonstrated in this population, long-term services are…