Purpose: Persons with aphasia (PWA) experience differences in attention after stroke, potentially impacting cognitive/language performance. This secondary analysis investigated physiologically measured vigilant attention during linguistic and nonlinguistic processing in PWA and control participants. Method: To evaluate performance and attention in…

Purpose: Arousal and cognitive effort are relevant yet often overlooked components of attention during language processing. Pupillometry can be used to provide a psychophysiological index of arousal and cognitive effort. Given that much is unknown regarding the relationship between cognition and language deficits seen in people with aphasia (PWA),…

Purpose: Brain imaging has provided puzzle pieces in the understanding of language. In neurologically healthy populations, the structure of certain brain regions is associated with particular language functions (e.g., semantics, phonology). In studies on focal brain damage, certain brain regions or connections are considered sufficient or…

Background: Temporal information processing (TIP) underlies many aspects of cognitive functions like language, motor control, learning, memory, attention, etc. Millisecond timing may be assessed by sequencing abilities, e.g. the perception of event order. It may be measured with auditory temporal-order-threshold (TOT), i.e. a minimum time gap…

Wernicke's aphasia (WA) is the classical neurological model of comprehension impairment and, as a result, the posterior temporal lobe is assumed to be critical to semantic cognition. This conclusion is potentially confused by (a) the existence of patient groups with semantic impairment following damage to other brain regions (semantic dementia and…

Focal brain lesions are assumed to produce language deficits by two basic mechanisms: local cortical dysfunction at the lesion site, and remote cortical dysfunction due to disruption of the transfer and integration of information between connected brain regions. However, functional imaging studies investigating language outcome after aphasic…

Purpose: This article introduces a collection of consensus statements regarding the application of neuroplasticity principles to rehabilitation of dysphagia, dysarthria, apraxia, and aphasia.

Aphasia is an acquired language impairment that affects over 1 million individuals, the majority of whom are over age 65 (Groher, 1989). This disorder has typically been conceptualized within a cognitive neuroscience framework, but a behavioral interpretation of aphasia is also possible. Skinner's (1957) analysis of verbal behavior proposes a…

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…

When mental health clinicians perform mental status examinations, they examine the language patterns of patients because abnormal language patterns, sometimes referred to as language dysfluency, may indicate a thought disorder. Performing such examinations with deaf patients is a far more complex task, especially with traditionally underserved…

Reviews research indicating linguistic knowledge is not innate, that the infant brain is highly differentiated at birth, that processing biases that lead to the "standard brain plan" are innate and localized but not specific to language, and that the infant brain is highly plastic, permitting alternative "brain plans." (Author/CR)

Temporal control has often been suspected to be a critical factor in intonation production. In particular, disturbance in the production of fundamental frequency (F0) associated with intonation in patients with aphasia has been attributed to a primary underlying deficit in speech timing. The present study examined the speech timing abilities of…

In this paper, we reconsider some of the processes that distinguish production and comprehension. In particular, we discuss the specific forms of thinking involved in each: "thinking for speaking" and "thinking for listening" (Black and Chiat, 2000; Slobin, 1996). We argue that thinking for speaking (or for any form of language output) crucially…

Investigated the source of agrammatic aphasic patients' difficulty comprehending semantically reversible sentences. Found approximately equal distributions of three distinct patterns. Results conflict with explanations of comprehension failure which state that a single pattern of performance on sentence structures characterizes comprehension of…

Examines Nickels's claim that interactive models of lexical access in speech production cannot account for naming data from a group of anomic patients. This paper reiterates that the behavior of connectionist models is not easily predictable without running the appropriate simulations, and discusses the role of frequency in lexical access in…