Individuals with Broca's aphasia often present with deficits in their ability to comprehend non-canonical sentences. This has been contrastingly characterized as a systematic loss of specific grammatical abilities or as individual variability in the dynamics between processing load and resource availability. The present study investigated sentence…

Background: Since his stroke 15 years ago, Tony O'Donnell has worked with BLISS, a symbolic, graphical language. BLISS has been used with a variety of clinical populations, including people with severe aphasia. O'Donnell found his adapted version of BLISS was meaningful to him when spoken and written English was not. The present study is part of a…

Bengali or Bangla is an Indo-Aryan language. It is the state language of West Bengal and Tripura and also spoken in some parts of Assam. Bangla is the official language of Bangladesh. With nearly 230 million speakers (Wikipedia 2010), Bangla is one of the most spoken language in the world. Bangla language is the most commonly used language in West…

This study analysed the capacity of the Catalan and Spanish versions of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT) to distinguish between normal and pathological aging. Both versions of the test were administered to 45 bilingual subjects: 15 healthy aging subjects, 15 patients with mild cognitive impairment and 15 patients with Alzheimer's disease. To…

South Africa, as a multilingual country, offers the opportunity for examining the interaction between aphasic symptomatology and the parameters of language. Effective intervention techniques depend on an understanding of clinical linguistics. This article describes an intervention study with two Sesotho-speaking individuals with anomia. Sesotho as…

Purpose: Individuals with probable Alzheimer disease (pAD) are frequently impaired at picture naming. This study examined whether a semantic elaboration task would facilitate naming in pAD, and whether training either semantically typical or atypical stimulus items facilitated generalized improvement in picture naming and category generation…

Narrative discourse is an essential component of day-to-day communication, but little is known about narrative in Lewy body spectrum disorder (LBSD), including Parkinson's disease (PD), Parkinson's disease with dementia (PDD), and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). We performed a detailed analysis of a semi-structured speech sample in 32 non-aphasic…

Few studies have directly compared the clinical and anatomical characteristics of patients with progressive aphasia to those of patients with aphasia caused by stroke. In the current study we examined fluent forms of aphasia in these two groups, specifically semantic dementia (SD) and persisting Wernicke's aphasia (WA) due to stroke. We compared…

Purpose: Outcomes of script training for individuals with apraxia of speech (AOS) and mild anomic aphasia were investigated. Script training is a functional treatment that has been successful for individuals with aphasia but has not been applied to individuals with AOS. Principles of motor learning were incorporated into training to promote…

Historically, agrammatism, a symptom of Broca's aphasia, has been associated with dysprosody, on account of speakers' slow, halting, and effortful speech. Almost all investigations of this phenomenon use experimental methods (reading, repetition). Thus, little is known about how prosody is used by speakers with agrammatism and understood by their…

The increased occurrence of strokes combined with the high incidence of bilingualism in many regions of the world has led to an increasing number of bilingual adults with aphasia. The literature on bilingual aphasia shows the need for valid, comprehensive and reliable assessment tools for diagnostic and treatment purposes. In spite of a growing…

Purpose: This Phase II treatment study examined the effect of Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST) on individuals with moderate-to-severe aphasia. Research questions addressed (a) pre- to posttreatment changes and pretreatment to treatment phase changes on probe sentences containing trained verbs (e.g., "The carpenter is 'measuring' the…

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…

Persons with traumatic brain injury (TBI) often show impaired linguistic and/or narrative abilities. The present study aimed to document the features of narrative discourse impairment in a group of adults with TBI. 14 severe TBI non-aphasic speakers (GCS less than 8) in the phase of neurological stability and 14 neurologically intact participants…

Purpose: Many adults with aphasia demonstrate concomitant deficits in working memory (WM), but such deficits are difficult to quantify because of a lack of validated measures as well as the complex interdependence between language and WM. We examined the feasibility, reliability, and internal consistency of an "n"-back task for…