Background: In recent years there has been significant interest in the differential processing of nouns and verbs in people with aphasia, but more limited consideration about whether the differences have implications for therapy. It remains unclear whether verbs can be treated in a similar way to nouns or should be treated using approaches that…

We investigated the on-line processing of unaccusative and unergative sentences in a group of eight Greek-speaking individuals diagnosed with Broca aphasia and a group of language-unimpaired subjects used as the baseline. The processing of unaccusativity refers to the reactivation of the postverbal trace by retrieving the mnemonic representation…

Processing of lexical verbs involves automatic access to argument structure entries entailed within the verb's representation. Recent neuroimaging studies with young normal listeners suggest that this involves bilateral posterior peri-sylvian tissue, with graded activation in these regions on the basis of argument structure complexity. The aim of…

Current accounts of spoken language assume the existence of a lexicon where wordforms are stored and interact during spoken language perception, understanding and production. Despite the theoretical importance of the wordform lexicon, the exact localization and function of the lexicon in the broader context of language use is not well understood.…

Purpose: The effects of intention gesture treatment (IGT) and pantomime gesture treatment (PGT) on word retrieval were compared in people with aphasia. Method: Four individuals with aphasia and word retrieval impairments subsequent to left-hemisphere stroke participated in a single-participant crossover treatment design. Each participant viewed…

We report the naming performance of a Spanish patient (AQF) suffering from Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA). AQF's performance revealed a grammatical category-specific deficit, with poorer performance in verb than in noun naming. Furthermore, this dissociation was only present in written naming. Importantly, the patient's dissociation between…

The Greek and the English versions of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT) were used to assess the linguistic abilities of a premorbidly highly proficient late bilingual female after a haemorrhagic cerebrovascular accident involving the left temporo-parietal lobe. The BAT was administered in the two languages on separate occasions by the first author,…

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…

This article reconsiders the events that took place at the 1868 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA) in Norwich. Paul Broca and John Hughlings Jackson were invited to speak on the new and controversial subject of aphasia. Over the ensuing decades, there have been repeated references made to a debate between Broca…

In this study we investigated the recovery patterns of language and cognitive functions in patients with post-traumatic language processing deficits and in patients with aphasia following a stroke. The correlation of specific language functions and cognitive functions was analyzed in the acute phase and 6 months later. Significant recovery of the…

This review brings together evidence from a diverse field of methods for investigating sex differences in language processing. Differences are found in certain language-related deficits, such as stuttering, dyslexia, autism and schizophrenia. Common to these is that language problems may follow from, rather than cause the deficit. Large studies…

This study investigated the effects of phonologic treatment for anomia in aphasia. We proposed that if treatment were directed at the level of the phonologic processor, opportunities for naming via a phonological route, as opposed to a strictly whole word route, would be enhanced, thereby improving naming. The participants, ten people with anomia…

Current approaches to assessing agrammatism use data from restricted contexts, such as picture description and story telling tasks. There is evidence in the conversation analysis literature to suggest that conversational grammar may differ markedly from the grammar of such elicited language samples. The disparity between conversational and test…

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'…

Most naming treatments in aphasia either assume a phonological or semantic emphasis or a combination thereof. However, it is unclear whether semantic or phonological treatments recruit the same or different cortical areas in chronic aphasia. Employing three persons with aphasia, two of whom were non-fluent, the present study compared changes in…