Learning from errors: Exploration of the monitoring learning effect.

The present study examined spontaneous detection and repair of naming errors in people with aphasia to advance a theoretical understanding of how monitoring impacts learning in lexical access. Prior work in aphasia has found that spontaneous repair, but not mere detection without repair, of semantic naming errors leads to improved naming on those same items in the future when other factors are accounted for. The present study sought to replicate this finding in a new, larger sample of participants and to examine the critical role of self-generated repair in this monitoring learning effect.

Mapping articulatory and grammatical subcomponents of fluency deficits in post-stroke aphasia.

Fluent speech production is a critical aspect of language processing and is central to aphasia diagnosis and treatment. Multiple cognitive processes and neural subsystems must be coordinated to produce fluent narrative speech. To refine the understanding of these systems, measures that minimize the influence of other cognitive processes were defined for articulatory deficits and grammatical deficits.

Does naming accuracy improve through self-monitoring of errors?

This study examined spontaneous self-monitoring of picture naming in people with aphasia. Of primary interest was whether spontaneous detection or repair of an error constitutes an error signal or other feedback that tunes the production system to the desired outcome. In other words, do acts of monitoring cause adaptive change in the language system? A second possibility, not incompatible with the first, is that monitoring is indicative of an item's representational strength, and strength is a causal factor in language change.

A large, searchable, web-based database of aphasic performance on picture naming and other tests of cognitive function.

Many research questions in aphasia can only be answered through access to substantial numbers of patients and to their responses on individual test items. Since such data are often unavailable to individual researchers and institutions, we have developed and made available the Moss Aphasia Psycholinguistics Project Database: a large, searchable, web-based database of patient performance on psycholinguistic and neuropsychological tests. The database contains data from over 240 patients covering a wide range of aphasia subtypes and severity, some of whom were tested multiple times.

Neuroanatomical dissociation for taxonomic and thematic knowledge in the human brain.

It is thought that semantic memory represents taxonomic information differently from thematic information. This study investigated the neural basis for the taxonomic-thematic distinction in a unique way. We gathered picture-naming errors from 86 individuals with poststroke language impairment (aphasia).

Support for anterior temporal involvement in semantic error production in aphasia: new evidence from VLSM.

Semantic errors in aphasia (e.g., naming a horse as "dog") frequently arise from faulty mapping of concepts onto lexical items.

Anterior temporal involvement in semantic word retrieval: voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping evidence from aphasia.

Analysis of error types provides useful information about the stages and processes involved in normal and aphasic word production. In picture naming, semantic errors (horse for goat) generally result from something having gone awry in lexical access such that the right concept was mapped to the wrong word. This study used the new lesion analysis technique known as voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping to investigate the locus of lesions that give rise to semantic naming errors.

A patient registry for cognitive rehabilitation research: a strategy for balancing patients' privacy rights with researchers' need for access.

Objective: To describe a consent-based Patient Research Registry designed to improve the quality and efficiency of cognitive rehabilitation research by balancing patients' privacy rights with researchers' need for access to research participants.

Design: Description of a protocol for a Patient Research Registry.

Setting: Three rehabilitation hospitals.

Investigation of ethnic differences in willingness to enroll in a rehabilitation research registry: a study of the Northeast Cognitive Rehabilitation Research Network.

Objective: To investigate differences between African American and white respondents in willingness to enroll in a rehabilitation research registry for future research and to determine if reasons for consenting and refusing to enroll differ by ethnicity.

Design: Inpatient recruitment results from 739 African American and white respondents in which patients were admitted to a rehabilitation hospital with a diagnosis of stroke or traumatic brain injury.

Results: A similar proportion of African American and white respondents (both patients and surrogates) consented to enroll in the registry (72% of all African American respondents vs.