Background: Unaided communication behaviours may provide communication support for persons with severe cerebrovascular accidents (CVA), as these individuals often experience severe communication difficulties, regardless of the aetiology. Though often subtle, these behaviours are present during all stages of recovery, and therefore communication…

Background: Cognitive-communication difficulties are often associated with dementia and can impact a person's ability to participate in meaningful conversations. This can create challenges to families, reflecting the reality that people living with dementia rarely have just one regular conversation partner, but interact with multiple family…

Background: Despite evidence that Communication Partner Training (CPT) can enable health professionals to communicate more effectively with people with aphasia (PWA), an evidence-practice gap exists. To address this, a tailored implementation intervention was developed and trialled to improve health professionals' implementation of communication…

Purpose: Communicative participation poses a challenge in meetings between healthcare professionals (HCPs) and people with aphasia (PwA). How communication is affected by aphasia in group meetings, where several healthcare professionals participate together with the patient, is largely unexplored. The aim of this study was to investigate…

Background: Impairments in social communication are ubiquitous after moderate to severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). Most attempts to quantify these impairments have been descriptive rather than theoretically motivated. We propose that Relevance Theory provides a framework for characterizing social communication limitations after TBI and linking…

Background: An individual's ability to make autonomous decisions is fundamental to self-determination. The presence of neurological pathology, for example, aphasia, and its associated difficulties with language and/or cognition, may affect an individual's capacity to make decisions, or their ability to reveal their capacity to make decisions.…

Background: Spoken discourse impairments post-traumatic brain injury (TBI) are well-documented and heterogeneous in nature. These impairments have chronic implications for adults in terms of employment, socializing and community involvement. Intervention delivered by a speech-language pathologist (SLP) is recommended for adults with discourse…

Background: To manage conversational breakdowns, individuals with hearing loss (HL) often have to request their interlocutors to repeat or clarify. Aims: To examine how middle-aged hearing aid (HA) users manage conversational breakdowns by using open-class repair initiations (e.g., questions such as "sorry," "what" and…

Background: Major neurocognitive disorder (MND) alters cognition, memory and language, and consequently affects communication. Speech-language therapy (SLT) may alleviate communication difficulties. Aims: This pilot study explored the effects of intensive SLT emphasizing memory, language, and discourse impairment and complementary communication…

Background: This study is a longitudinal follow-up to prior work examining the important pragmatic skill of communication repair (i.e., the ability to respond effectively to a request for clarification of an unclear message) across three neurodevelopmental disabilities in which language skills are impaired: fragile X syndrome with and without…

Background: Previous research has shown that speakers with aphasia rely on enactment more often than non-brain-damaged language users. Several studies have been conducted to explain this observed increase, demonstrating that spoken language containing enactment is easier to produce and is more engaging to the conversation partner. This paper…

Background: Communication strategy training (CST) is a recognized part of UK speech and language therapists' (SLTs) role when working with a person with aphasia. Multiple CST interventions have been published but, to date, there are no published studies exploring clinical practice in this area. Aims: To investigate UK SLTs' current CST practices.…

Background: Features of dysarthria associated with Parkinson's disease (PD), such as low volume, variable rate of speech and increased pauses, impact speaker intelligibility. Those affected report restricted interactional participation, although this area is under explored. Aims: To examine naturally occurring instances of problems with…

Background: Nonverbal communication deficits are characteristic of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and have been reported in some later-born siblings of children with ASD (heightened-risk (HR) children). However, little work has investigated gesture as a function of language ability, which varies greatly in this population. Aims: This longitudinal…

Background: Communication problems stemming from Alzheimer's disease (AD) often result in misunderstandings that can be linked with problem behaviours and increased caregiver stress. Moreover, these communication breakdowns also can result either from caregivers' use of ineffective communication strategies, which paradoxically are…