Studies of bilingualism sometimes require healthy subjects to be assessed for proficiency at auditory sentence processing in their second language (L2). The Syntactic Comprehension task of the Bilingual Aphasia Test could satisfy this need. For ease and uniformity of application, we automated its English (Paradis, M., Libben, G., and Hummel, K.…

As a follow-up to previous research, this report focuses on the wide range of gestures employed by an individual with aphasia to overcome instances of unintelligibility and re-establish intelligibility. The gestures observed are woven seamlessly into the fabric of the interactions and range from deictic to metaphorical or symbolic in nature.…

Background: It is widely accepted that service users should be actively involved in new service developments, but there remain issues about how best to consult with them and how to reconcile their views with those of service providers. Aims: This paper uses data from The Aphasia in Scotland study, set up by NHS Quality Improvement Scotland to…

Background: Despite recognition of the need for increased long-term support for people with aphasia following stroke, there remains limited evidence for effective service-level interventions. Aims: To evaluate the outcomes and experiences of people participating in the Communication Hub for Aphasia in North Tyneside (CHANT), a 2-year partnership…

Purpose: There is a pressing need for psychometrically sound naming materials for Spanish/English bilingual adults. To address this need, in this study the authors examined the psychometric properties of An Object and Action Naming Battery (An O&A Battery; Druks & Masterson, 2000) in bilingual speakers. Method: Ninety-one Spanish/English…

This volume provides a comprehensive and in-depth handbook of qualitative research in the field of communication disorders. It introduces and illustrates the wide range of qualitative paradigms that have been used in recent years to investigate various aspects of communication disorders. The first part of the Handbook introduces in some detail the…

We report on the case of an elderly bilingual woman presenting with a diagnosis of primary progressive aphasia. The participant's native language was Friulian (L1), a predominantly oral Romance language, and her second language was Italian (L2), formally learned at primary school in oral and written forms. We investigated her linguistic abilities…

We used eye-tracking to investigate lexical processing in aphasic participants by examining the fixation time course for rhyme (e.g., "carrot-parrot") and cohort (e.g., "beaker-beetle") competitors. Broca's aphasic participants exhibited larger rhyme competition effects than age-matched controls. A re-analysis of previously reported data (Yee,…

Conduction aphasia is a language disorder characterized by frequent speech errors, impaired verbatim repetition, a deficit in phonological short-term memory, and naming difficulties in the presence of otherwise fluent and grammatical speech output. While traditional models of conduction aphasia have typically implicated white matter pathways,…

In a world that is becoming more multilingual, bilingual aphasia is a clinical problem with a major clinical impact. However, at present we lack causal explanations of the many features of recovery patterns and there is no consensus about the language in which the patient should receive speech therapy. Further advance requires an understanding of…

The history of the evolution of language assessments for children and adults with language disorders is described briefly. This is followed by a discussion on language assessment of the clinical population with an emphasis on linguistic profiling, illustrated through the Linguistic Profile Test. Discourse analysis, in particular, is highlighted…

This paper investigates the cognitive processes underlying picture naming and auditory word repetition. In the two-step model of lexical access, both the semantic and phonological steps are involved in naming, but the former has no role in repetition. Assuming recognition of the to-be-repeated word, repetition could consist of retrieving the…

The pervasiveness of word-finding difficulties in aphasia has motivated several theories regarding management of the deficit and its effectiveness. Recently, the hypothesis was advanced that instead of simply accompanying speech gestures participate in language production by increasing the semantic activation of words grounded in sensory-motor…

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate the neural processing characteristics associated with word retrieval abilities after a phonologically-based treatment for anomia in two stroke patients with aphasia. Neural activity associated with a phonological and a semantic task was compared before and after treatment with…

We report the case of an English-speaking aphasic patient (JP) with left posterior-frontal damage affecting the inferior frontal and precentral gyri. In speaking, JP was impaired with the regular inflections of nouns and pseudonouns, making errors like "pears" instead of "pear" or "door" for "doors", while the spoken production of noun stems and…