Wrinkled Feet

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It's a Poor Sort of Memory That Only Works Backwards

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Computerized axial tomography in aphasiology

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Group Designs for the Study of Aphasia

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Phonologic Rehabilitation of Anomia in Aphasia

The single most common feature of aphasia is impairment in ability to name, whether it involves naming seen objects, or producing nouns, verbs and other words conveying meaning in spontaneous language. The traditional treatment approach to this problem is to explicitly train aphasic patients in naming. Controlled studies have shown that this approach may be quite effective. However, typically generalization is very limited, that is, the knowledge gained by the patient tends to be limited to the words actually trained, and there is at best very modest improvement in performance with untrained words (limited mainly to those that are semantically related to the trained words). Because generalization is can be limited with this approach, there currently exists no viable means of training patients on the full corpus of words (perhaps several thousand) they are likely to need in daily life. Two approaches might be taken to solving this problem: 1) develop cost effective means for providing training on several thousand words; and 2) develop alternative training methods, e.g., phonological therapy, that potentially could intrinsically generalize widely. The focus of this proposal is the second of these two approaches. Thus, the primary purpose of this Phase II clinical rehabilitation study was to examine the effect of a phonologic based treatment on confrontation naming by individuals with anomic aphasia. We used a single-subject ABA design replicated across ten participants. The primary research question asked if phonologic treatment would improve confrontation naming. Secondary research questions addressed the impact of treatment on 1) generalization to untrained behaviors such as discourse production; 2) retention effects at 3-months; 3) phonologic production and 4) nonword repetition (potential evidence of phoneme sequence knowledge acquisition)

Treatment of Apraxia of Speech in Adults

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The Natural History of Cohesion in Narrative Discourse after Stroke

Little is known about the natural recovery of narrative discourse after stroke. While several studies have analyzed the recovery of language in individuals with aphasia, there are no known studies of the natural recovery of narrative discourse in individuals without diagnosed language disorders. In this study we evaluate the cohesiveness of narrative discourse in a cohort of individuals who have suffered a stroke without a diagnosed language impairment. We analyze their narrative discourse at three intervals post-stroke and report findings that provide insights into the subtle disruptions of language following stroke and the manner in which they change over time