Many facts about aphasic and nonaphasic naming are explained by models that use spreading activation to map from the semantics of a word to its phonology. The implemented model of picture naming discussed here achieves this by coupling interactive feedback with two selection steps. The model's structure and default parameters were set up to match…

We reanalyzed the data in Drai and Grodzinksy (2005), considering individual patients' responses to different sentence types to be non-independent events. The analyses revealed effects of two of the three factors identified by Drai and Grodzinsky-constituent movement and passive mood. The result is inconsistent with the trace deletion hypothesis;…

Investigations of language processing in aphasia have increasingly implicated performance factors such as slowed activation and/or rapid decay of linguistic information. This approach is supported by studies utilizing a communication system ("SentenceShaper"[TM]) which functions as a "processing prosthesis." The system may reduce the impact of…

Two experiments investigated phonological, derivational-morphological and semantic aspects of grammatical gender assignment in a perception and a production task in German aphasic patients and age-matched controls. The agreement of a gender indicating adjective (feminine, masculine or neuter) and a noun was evaluated during perception in…

This paper investigates stress assignment in Dutch aphasic patients in non-word repetition, as well as in real-word and non-word reading. Performance on the non-word reading task was similar for the aphasic patients and the control group, as mainly regular stress was assigned to the targets. However, there were group differences on the real-word…

The present study investigated verbal recall of semantically preserved and degraded words and nonwords by taking into consideration the status of one's semantic short-term memory (STM). Two experiments were conducted on 2 Chinese individuals with aphasia. The first experiment showed that they had largely preserved phonological processing abilities…

Patients with conduction aphasia have been characterized as having a short-term memory deficit that leads to relative difficulty on span and repetition tasks. It has also been observed that these same patients often get the gist of what is said to them, even if they are unable to repeat the information verbatim. To study this phenomenon…

Bilateral vascular thalamic lesions are rare. Although a variety of neurobehavioral manifestations have been described, the literature is less documented with regard to accompanying linguistic disturbances. This article presents an in-depth neurolinguistic analysis of the language symptoms of a patient who incurred bilateral paramedian ischemic…

In this paper, we investigate the ability of Dutch agrammatic Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics to assign reference to possessive pronouns in elided VP constructions. The assumption is that the comprehension problems in these two populations have different sources that are revealed in distinct patterns of responses. The focus is primarily on the…

Behavioral variation in Broca's aphasia has been characterized as boundless, calling into question the validity of the syndrome-based schema and related diagnostic methods of acquired language disorders. More generally, this putative variability has cast serious doubts on the feasibility of localizing linguistic operations in cortex. We present a…

This article reports on the linguistic and pragmatic language skills of adults with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Seventeen adults (aged 18-67 years) with a diagnosis of ASD were assessed using the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB), the Right Hemisphere Language Battery (RHLB) and the Test of Nonverbal Intelligence-Second Edition…

This study examines the comprehension patterns of various sentence types by Mandarin-speaking aphasic patients and evaluates the validity of the predictions from the Trace-Deletion Hypothesis (TDH) and the Double Dependency Hypothesis (DDH). Like English, the canonical word order in Mandarin is SVO, but the two languages differ in that the head…

The processing of words and pictures representing actions and objects was tested in 21 aphasic patients and 20 healthy controls across three word production tasks: picture-naming (PN), single word reading (WR) and word repetition (WRP). Analysis (1) targeted task and lexical category (noun-verb), revealing worse performance on PN and verb items…

Purpose: This study examined the benefits of a self-administered, clinician-guided, computer-based, cued naming therapy. Results of intense and nonintense treatment schedules were compared. Method: A single-participant design with multiple baselines across behaviors and varied treatment intensity for 2 trained lists was replicated over 4…

Nonaphasic speakers are known to take longer to name pictures when they are blocked by semantic category and repeated multiple times. We replicated this ''semantic blocking effect'' in older controls and showed that in aphasia, the effect is manifested in increased error rates when naming semantically homogeneous, compared to mixed blocks. We…