Aphasia intervention has made increasing use of technology in recent years. The evidence base, which is largely limited to the investigation of spoken language outcomes, indicates positive treatment effects for people with mild to moderate levels of aphasia. Outcomes for those with severe aphasia, however, are less well documented and - where reported - present less consistent gains for measure...

In this report we comment upon subject selection and methodology, and we describe some recent studies of syntactic processing in aphasia. Our data show that, like neurologically intact subjects, Wernicke's patients reactivate moved constituents (instantiate coreference) at the site of their extraction (even for sentences that they do not understand). Broca's patients, by constrast, are shown no...

The present study investigated hierarchical lexical semantic structure in oral descriptions of concrete word meanings produced by a subject (ZZ) diagnosed with anomic aphasia due to left occipital lesions. The focus of the analysis was production of a) nouns at different levels of semantic specificity (e.g., "robin"-"bird"-"animal") and b) words describing sensory or motor experiences (e.g., "b...

Persons with aphasia (PWA) have been found in many previous studies to exhibit impaired performance on attention processing tasks, even when these tasks do not contain linguistic stimuli. There is also some evidence that as individuals, PWA may show more intra-individual variability (i.e. time-based fluctuations) in attention than healthy controls. The current study systematically examines two ...

A typical case of transcortical sensory aphasia (TSA) is presented, in which the Wada test suggests that it is the right hemisphere which enables the patient to repeat orally. It is supposed that one of the mechanisms of preserved repetition in TSA is linked to an exceptional ability for repetition of the right hemisphere, which may help to explain why cases of TSA are so rare.

Topographical evaluation of aphasic brain lesions can enhance our knowledge of cognitive physiology and plasticity. This prospective study was conducted on 100 stroke-afflicted patients with aphasia admitted in Valie-Asr Hospital (Khorasan, Iran) in 2003. Topography of infarct lesions was detected by a neurologist based on the map of brain vascular territories in CT-scan. Aphasic lesions catego...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The goal of this study was to develop a functional MRI (fMRI) paradigm robust and reproducible enough in healthy subjects to be adapted for a follow-up study aiming at evaluating the anatomical substratum of recovery in poststroke aphasia. METHODS Ten right-handed subjects were studied longitudinally using fMRI (7 of them being scanned twice) and compared with a patient...

The logopenic variant of Primary Progressive Aphasia, or logopenic aphasia, is a the most recently described variant of Primary Progressive Aphasia and also the least well defined. This variant can present clinical findings that are also common to Alzheimer's disease, given they both share the same cytopathologic findings. This article reports the clinical case of a patient for whom it proved d...

We report the naming performance of an early and highly proficient Spanish-Catalan bilingual (JPG) suffering from Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA). JPG's performance revealed a grammatical category-specific deficit, with worse performance in naming verbs than nouns. This dissociation was present in oral and written naming and in his two languages, and it seems to stem from damage to, at least,...

This paper is about syntactic processing in aphasia. Specifically, we present data concerning the ability of Broca's and Wernicke's aphasic patients to link moved constituents and empty elements in real time. We show that Wernicke's aphasic patients carry out this syntactic analysis in a normal fashion, but that Broca's aphasic patients do not. We discuss these data in the context of some curre...