Although the efficacy of aphasia therapy has been demonstrated, the very fact that this demonstration continues to have detractors shows that the treatment of aphasia, despite its effectiveness, remains unsatisfactory. Why is this the case? We postulate four contributing reasons: (1) The pathophysiology of the late stages of stroke is poorly understood; (2) the therapeutic options for subacute ...

INTRODUCTION Globalization imposes challenges to the field of behavioural neurology, among which is an increase in the prevalence of bilingual aphasia. Thus, aphasiologists have increasingly focused on bilingual aphasia therapy and, more recently, on the identification of the most efficient procedures for triggering language recovery in bilinguals with aphasia. Therapy in both languages is ofte...

The UK is a diverse society where individuals regularly interact with speakers with different accents. Whilst there is a growing body of research on the impact of speaker accent on comprehension in people with aphasia, there is none which explores their ability to identify accents. This study investigated the ability of this group to identify the geographical origins of a speaker. Age-matched p...

OBJECTIVES The study sought to identify key design features that could be used to create a new framework for group-based health interventions. We designed and tested the first session of a group intervention for stroke survivors with aphasia which was aimed at nurturing new psychological connections between group members. SETTING The intervention session, a participant focus group and intervi...

In interpreting a sentence, listeners rely on a variety of linguistic cues to assign grammatical roles such as agent and patient. The present study considered the relative ranking of three cues to agenthood (word order, noun animacy, and subject-verb agreement) in normal and aphasic speakers of Hindi. Because animacy plays a grammatical role in Hindi (determining the nature and acceptability of...

Anomia is a commonly found in aphasia and has been attributed to a loss of representations (storage deficit) or to a loss of access to these representations (retrieval deficit). Bromocriptine, a dopamine agonist, was tested on four patients, two men and two women, with nonfluent aphasia. The patients were tested in an open-label ABBA design using a stochastic model that measured the degree of s...

We trained a patient with expressive aphasia and a deficit in phoneme-to-grapheme conversion to produce spoken English verbs with correct tense morphology. After training, he showed evidence of generalization to production of written regular, but not irregular, verbs in a sentence completion task. These data support dual-route, rule-based models within the brain for morphosyntactic operations.

Across most languages, verbs produced by agrammatic aphasic individuals are frequently marked by syntactically and semantically inappropriate inflectional affixes, such as Last night, I walking home. As per language production models, verb inflection errors in English agrammatism could arise from three potential sources: encoding the verbs' morphology based on temporal information at the concep...