The Aphasia Center is a service delivery model that provides an interactive community for persons with aphasia. This model has been increasing in popularity over the last 20 years. Aphasia Centers are consistent with a social model of health care and disability. They offer the potential for linguistic, communicative, and psychosocial benefits. The…

Despite the well documented pragmatic deficits that can arise subsequent to Right Hemisphere Brain Damage (RHBD), few researchers have directly studied everyday conversations involving people with RHBD. In recent years, researchers have begun applying Conversation Analysis (CA) to the everyday talk of people with aphasia. This research programme…

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…

This study reports intraindividual variations in the semantic and syntactic complexity of language and in the linguistic errors produced by mildly and moderately impaired adult aphasic subjects (N=10) in different communication contexts. Aphasic patients exhibited at least as many linguistic variations as controls in response to changing…

The purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate the relationship between functional communication and executive function ability in aphasia. Twenty-five participants with aphasia underwent examination with an extensive test battery including measures of functional communication, executive function ability, and language impairment.…

Language sample data from normal subjects (ages 40-79) were collected to determine how normal aging might affect performance on a picture description task, routinely used for assessment of aphasic individuals. Only an increase in the number of paraphasias and a decrease in communication efficiency correlated with increased age. (DB)

There has been a marked increase in attention to the measurement of ''outcomes'' after speech-language intervention for adult aphasia. Consumers, speech-language pathologists (SLPs), and funding sources desire evidence of therapy outcomes that improve communication and enhance the quality of life for people with aphasia. While many assessment…