Previous studies have used semantic verb categories to compare how speakers with and without aphasia use verb types during narrative monologue discourse tasks. In this study, we explore the types of verbs used by speakers with and without aphasia during conversation. Using previously collected conversational discourse samples produced by 23 adults…

Aphasia therapy should address communication in everyday contexts. One type of social interaction that occurs frequently in the daily lives of spouses is joint decision-making. Currently, no known study has investigated how spouses collaboratively make decisions when one of the spouses has aphasia and the other one does not. The purpose of this…

Stakeholder-engaged research (SER) is common in many health-related fields and is gaining momentum in aphasiology. Stakeholder-engaged research shares many of the same goals and values as the Life Participation Approach to Aphasia (LPAA). The aim of this article is to identify how these two frameworks complement each other and can be applied to…

Background: Pictures drawn by people with aphasia (PWA) are often more challenging to understand than those drawn by healthy people. There are two types of objects: those that tend to be drawn symbolically (symbolically drawn objects--SOs) and those that are likely to be drawn realistically (realistically drawn objects--ROs). Aims: To compare the…

Friendship is an essential component of quality of life. The ongoing lifestyle changes and strain typically experienced by care partners of people with aphasia (PWA) can impact their social network, with friendships being particularly vulnerable to change. This study aimed to understand the impact of caregiving on care partners' friendships over…

People with aphasia may produce speech errors or pauses during speaking turns. A communication partner may choose to guess the person's intended meaning, or may allow the person time to repair their turns (i.e., edited turns). The aim of this study was to understand the topic-related effects that occur when speakers without aphasia allow their…

Background: Patients with anomic aphasia experience difficulties in narrative processing. General discourse measures are time consuming and require necessary skills. Core lexicon analysis has been proposed as an effort-saving approach but has not been developed in Mandarin discourse. Aims: This exploratory study was aimed (1) to apply core lexicon…

Purpose: Individuals with aphasia identify discourse-level communication (i.e., language in use) as a high priority for treatment. The central premise of most aphasia treatments is that restoring language at the phoneme, word, and/or sentence level will generalize to discourse. However, treatment-related changes in discourse-level communication…

Background: Meaningful, varied, joyful conversation is an important therapy target for adults with language or cognitive-communication disorders following acquired brain injury (ABI). However, the complexity of daily communication is often reduced to component parts within intervention programmes, with mixed evidence of generalization to everyday…

Background: People with aphasia (PWA) frequently experience difficulties in understanding longer written content such as paragraphs or books. Reading strategies are a promising approach to treat text-level reading comprehension deficits in PWA. Nevertheless, empirical evidence for their efficacy remains rare. Aims: The primary objective of this…

Purpose: Limited research exists assessing speech perception in school-age children with speech sound disorder (SSD) and childhood apraxia of speech (CAS); despite early evidence that speech perception may lead to error-prone motor planning/programming. In this study, we examine speech perception performance in school-age children with and without…

Purpose: To date, there are no automated tools for the identification and fine-grained classification of paraphasias within discourse, the production of which is the hallmark characteristic of most people with aphasia (PWA). In this work, we fine-tune a large language model (LLM) to automatically predict paraphasia targets in Cinderella story…

Purpose: Speech--Music Therapy for Aphasia (SMTA), a method that combines speech therapy and music therapy, is introduced as a treatment method for childhood apraxia of speech (CAS). SMTA will be evaluated in a proof-ofprinciple study. The first case study is presented herein. Method: SMTA was evaluated in a study with a single-subject…

Background: People with aphasia (PWA) can experience functional numeracy difficulties, that is, problems understanding or using numbers in everyday life, which can have numerous negative impacts on their daily lives. There is growing interest in designing functional numeracy interventions for PWA; however, there are limited suitable assessments…

Background: Engagement is recognized as an important factor in aphasia treatment response and outcomes, yet gaps remain in our understanding of engagement and practices that promote engagement from the client perspective. Aims: The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore how clients with aphasia experience engagement during their…