Background: The most common cause of aphasia is a left middle cerebral artery stroke affecting the left perisylvian region of the brain. The perisylvian region is critical for supporting phonological processing, and damage to this region results in difficulty with retrieving and manipulating speech sounds. The impact of weakened phonology has been…

Discourse cohesion and coherence give communication its continuity providing the grammatical and lexical links that hold an utterance or text together and give it meaning. Researchers often link cohesion and coherence deficits to the frontal lobes by drawing attention to frontal lobe dysfunction in populations where discourse cohesion and…

It is not clear how compound words are represented within the influential framework of the lemma-lexeme theory. Theoretically, compounds could be structured through a multiple lemma architecture, in which the lemma nodes of both the compound and its constituents are involved in lexical processing. If this were the case, syntactic properties of…

Language functions are generally represented in the left cerebral hemisphere. After early (prenatally acquired or perinatally acquired) left hemispheric brain damage language functions may be salvaged by reorganization into the right hemisphere. This is different from brain lesions acquired in adulthood which normally lead to aphasia. Right…

This article presents an investigation of the relationship between lesioning and neuroimaging methods of assessing functional specialisation, using synthetic brain imaging (SBI) and lesioning of a connectionist network of past-tense formation. The model comprised two processing "routes": one was a direct route between layers of input and output…

Few studies have examined connected speech in demented and non-demented patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). We assessed the speech production of 35 patients with Lewy body spectrum disorder (LBSD), including non-demented PD patients, patients with PD dementia (PDD), and patients with dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), in a semi-structured…

Persons with traumatic brain injury (TBI) often show impaired linguistic and/or narrative abilities. The present study aimed to document the features of narrative discourse impairment in a group of adults with TBI. 14 severe TBI non-aphasic speakers (GCS less than 8) in the phase of neurological stability and 14 neurologically intact participants…

Many theories of language production and perception assume that in the normal course of processing a word, additional non-target words (lexical neighbors) become active. The properties of these neighbors can provide insight into the structure of representations and processing mechanisms in the language processing system. To infer the properties of…

Purpose: Bilingual aphasia generally affects both languages. However, the age of acquisition of the second language (L2) seems to play a role in the anatomo-functional correlation of the syntactical/grammatical processes, thus potentially influencing the L2 syntactic impairment following a stroke. The present study aims to analyze the influence of…

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 study examines sentence-level language abilities of amnesic H.M. to test competing theoretical conceptions of relations between language and memory. We present 11 new sources of experimental evidence indicating deficits in H.M's comprehension and production of non-cliche sentences. Contrary to recent claims that H.M.'s comprehension is…