Using informative verbal exchanges to promote verb retrieval in nonfluent aphasia.

Purpose: The goal of this study was to determine whether positive treatment effects of a modified constraint-induced language therapy focused on verb production would generalize to unpracticed items and tasks.

Method: Four individuals participated in a single-subject treatment design protocol. The treatment involved intensive practice producing verbs in sentences in an informative communicative exchange.

Effects of Noun-Verb Conceptual/ Phonological Relatedness on Verb Production Changes in Broca's Aphasia.

Background: Individuals with Broca's aphasia show better performance on nouns than on verbs, but distinction between nouns and verbs is not always clear; some verbs are conceptually and/ or phonologically related to nouns, while others are not. Inconsistent results on effects of noun-verb relatedness on verb production have been reported in the literature.

Aims: We investigated (1) whether verb instrumentality (a conceptual relationship to nouns) or homonymy (a phonological relationship to nouns) would affect verb production in individuals with Broca's aphasia and (2) whether conceptual/ phonological noun-verb relationship would affect responsiveness to aphasia therapy that focused on verb production.

The common objects memory test (COMT): a simple test with cross-cultural applicability.

The Common Objects Memory Test (COMT) was developed to assess age-related memory impairments in individuals with a range of educational, language and cultural backgrounds. The COMT is a list-learning protocol that uses photographs of common objects to bypass difficulties posed by written words for individuals who are illiterate or have limited education. Preliminary data are presented for 336 healthy adults and 90 patients with dementia.

Prosodic changes in aphasic speech: timing.

Controversy remains about the impairment of prosody in aphasia, particularly with regard to speech timing. This paper addresses this topic through an analysis of timing in four sets of a common morphological paradigm. The paradigm consisted of a basic form (stem) and two longer derived forms (e.

TRAINING VERB PRODUCTION IN COMMUNICATIVE CONTEXT: EVIDENCE FROM A PERSON WITH CHRONIC NON-FLUENT APHASIA.

BACKGROUND: The use of constraint-induced treatment in aphasia therapy has yielded promising but mixed results. AIMS: We conducted a treatment study with an individual with chronic non-fluent aphasia. The goal of the treatment was to improve verb production in sentence- and narrative- contexts.

A common mechanism in verb and noun naming deficits in Alzheimer's patients.

We tested the ability of Alzheimer's patients and elderly controls to name living and non-living nouns, and manner and instrument verbs. Patients' error patterns and relative performance with different categories showed evidence of graceful degradation for both nouns and verbs, with particular domain-specific impairments for living nouns and instrument verbs. Our results support feature-based, semantic representations for nouns and verbs and support the role of inter-correlated features in noun impairment, and the role of noun knowledge in instrument verb impairment.

Language and Dementia: Neuropsychological Aspects.

This article reviews recent evidence for the relationship between extralinguistic cognitive and language abilities in dementia. A survey of data from investigations of three dementia syndromes (Alzheimer's disease, semantic dementia and progressive nonfluent aphasia) reveals that, more often than not, deterioration of conceptual organization appears associated with lexical impairments, whereas impairments in executive function are associated with sentence- and discourse-level deficits. These connections between extralinguistic functions and language ability also emerge from the literature on cognitive reserve and bilingualism that investigates factors that delay the onset and possibly the progression of neuropsychological manifestation of dementia.

Information content versus relational knowledge: semantic deficits in patients with Alzheimer's disease.

Studies of semantic impairment in Alzheimer's disease (AD) have yielded conflicting results, some finding evidence of considerable deficits, others finding that semantic knowledge is relatively intact. How do we reconcile findings from picture naming tasks that seem to indicate semantic impairment in AD with results from certain sorting tasks that suggest intact semantics? To investigate the basis of the contradictory results described above, we conducted a study using two types of tasks: (1) picture naming; and (2) board sorting. The board sorting task we used is a simultaneous similarity judgment task, in which participants are asked to place more similar concepts closer together and less similar ones farther apart.

Effect of speech task on intelligibility in dysarthria: a case study of Parkinson's disease.

This study assessed intelligibility in a dysarthric patient with Parkinson's disease (PD) across five speech production tasks: spontaneous speech, repetition, reading, repeated singing, and spontaneous singing, using the same phrases for all but spontaneous singing. The results show that this speaker was significantly less intelligible when speaking spontaneously than in the other tasks. Acoustic analysis suggested that relative intensity and word duration were not independently linked to intelligibility, but dysfluencies (from perceptual analysis) and articulatory/resonance patterns (from acoustic records) were related to intelligibility in predictable ways.