Purpose: ParAlg (Paraphasia Algorithms) is a software that automatically categorizes a person with aphasia's naming error (paraphasia) in relation to its intended target on a picture-naming test. These classifications (based on lexicality as well as semantic, phonological, and morphological similarity to the target) are important for…

Purpose: Of the three currently recognized variants of primary progressive aphasia, behavioral differentiation between the nonfluent/agrammatic (nfvPPA) and logopenic (lvPPA) variants is particularly difficult. The challenge includes uncertainty regarding diagnosis of apraxia of speech, which is subsumed within criteria for variant classification.…

Purpose: Kiran and colleagues (Kiran, 2007, 2008; Kiran & Johnson, 2008; Kiran & Thompson, 2003) previously suggested that training atypical examples within a semantic category is a more efficient treatment approach to facilitating generalization within the category than training typical examples. In the present study, the authors extended…

This study analysed the capacity of the Catalan and Spanish versions of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT) to distinguish between normal and pathological aging. Both versions of the test were administered to 45 bilingual subjects: 15 healthy aging subjects, 15 patients with mild cognitive impairment and 15 patients with Alzheimer's disease. To…

Purpose: Our previous work on manipulating typicality of category exemplars during treatment of naming deficits has shown that training atypical examples generalizes to untrained typical examples but not vice versa. In contrast to natural categories that consist of fuzzy boundaries, well-defined categories (e.g., "shapes") have rigid…

Purpose: This article discusses a novel approach for treatment of lexical retrieval deficits in aphasia in which treatment begins with complex, rather than simple, lexical stimuli. This treatment considers the semantic complexity of items within semantic categories, with a focus on their featural detail. Method and Results: Previous work on…

This study asked whether aphasic adults show different noun/verb retrieval patterns based upon their clinical categorization as fluent or nonfluent. Participants selected either the noun or the verb meaning of target words, as presented in three contexts. The framework was that nouns (associated with temporal lobe function) are processed, stored,…