Two studies used sentence-picture matching tests of sentence comprehension in 69 adults with aphasia. Clustering analysis yielded groups of patients whose performance steadily deteriorated and was affected by sentence types that were harder for the overall group. Results provide data relevant to the determinants of the complexity of a sentence in…

This study of 36 adults without brain damage examined the degree that reading comprehension therapy materials designed for adults with aphasia are capable of measuring reading comprehension. Subjects were able to answer correctly at least half of the questions from 40 paragraphs at greater than chance levels without reading the related paragraph.…

Compared the effectiveness of two speech therapy programs for patients with stroke-induced aphasia. Neither a systematic therapy program for auditory communication disorders nor a conventional stimulation therapy program had any clear effect on the patients' language recovery, especially when contrasted against the progress of patients receiving…

Gains made by a woman with Broca's aphasia as documented by traditional measures were paralleled by changes in conversation, including increased verbal output and efficiency, and changes in conversation-repair patterns. The progress documented with conversational discourse analysis was not observable from other test measures. (Author/DB)

Develops the distinction between "referential" and "modalizing" aspects of language and describes their functional dissociation, as observed in various manifestations of aphasia and in the speech of hemispherectomy and commissurotomy patients. (Author/JL)

A sociolinguistic, semantic analysis of intonation was conducted on a 15-minute natural interaction between an aphasic speaker, his wife, and his neighbor. Findings indicated the neighbor made more use of two dimensions of intonation, specifically pitch movements referring to shared information and marked tones, when addressing the aphasic speaker…

This study, using the Boston Naming Test, explores the notion that learned associations based on lexical co-occurrence probability influence sentence planning and may contribute to the ability of aphasic speakers to produce well-formed sentences. The study finds that use of lexical associates can facilitate sentence planning for adult aphasic…

Aphasia is a total or partial loss of the ability to produce or understand language, usually caused by brain disease or injury. In this case study, the aphasic patient (BMW) has a profound impairment of oral production and a very moderate impairment in comprehension. Several years of informal observation lead to the current study that contrasts…

This study seeks information on the mental representation of Verb-Noun (VN) nominal compounds through neuropsychological methods. The lexical retrieval of compound nouns is tested in 30 aphasic patients using a visual confrontation naming task. The target names are VN compounds, Noun-Noun (NN) compounds, and long morphologically simple nouns…

Verb production is notoriously difficult for individuals with Broca's aphasia, both at the word and at the sentence level. An intriguing question is at which level in the speech production these problems arise. The aim of the present study is to identify the functional locus of the impairment that results in verb production deficits in Broca's…

This study examined the nature of verb deficits in 14 individuals with probable Alzheimer's Disease (PrAD) and nine with agrammatic aphasia. Production was tested, controlling both semantic and syntactic features of verbs, using noun and verb naming, sentence completion, and narrative tasks. Noun and verb comprehension and a grammaticality…

Two consecutive treatments were conducted to investigate skill learning and generalization within and across cognitive-linguistic domains in a 62-year-old Spanish-English bilingual man with severe non-fluent aphasia. Treatment 1 was a cognitive-based treatment that emphasized non-linguistic skills, such as visual scanning, categorization, and…

In this paper, we investigate the performance of a Greek-English bilingual patient with Broca's aphasia and mild agrammatism on the placement of CP, MoodP, AspectP, and NegP-related adverbs, labeled specifier-type adverbs, and VP-related adverbs, labeled complement-type adverbs, by means of a constituent ordering task and a grammaticality judgment…

Research has shown that Broca's and Wernicke's aphasic patients show different impairments in auditory lexical processing. The results of an experiment with form-overlapping primes showed an inhibitory effect of form-overlap for control adults and a weak inhibition trend for Broca's aphasic patients, but a facilitatory effect of form-overlap was…

Correct information unit (CIU) and main event analyses are quantitative measures for analyzing discourse of individuals with aphasia. Comparative data from healthy younger (YG) and older (OD) adults and an investigation of the influence of stimuli type would considerably extend the usefulness of such analyses. The objectives were (a) to compare…