Case report: the effects of cerebellar tDCS in bilingual post-stroke aphasia.

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation may be a useful neuromodulation tool for enhancing the effects of speech and language therapy in people with aphasia, but research so far has focused on monolinguals. We present the effects of 9 sessions of anodal cerebellar tDCS (ctDCS) coupled with language therapy in a bilingual patient with chronic post-stroke aphasia caused by left frontal ischemia, in a double-blind, sham-controlled within-subject design. Language therapy was provided in his second language (L2).

Executive functions in primary progressive aphasia: A meta-analysis.

Executive functions (EFs) refer to a set of cognitive processes, specifically shifting, inhibition, updating of working memory, and are involved in the cognitive control of behavior. Conflicting results have been reported regarding impairments of EFs in Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA). We performed a multi-level meta-analysis to confirm whether deficits of EFs exist in this population, focusing on a common EFs composite, and the components shifting, inhibition and updating separately.

A Systematic Review of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation in Primary Progressive Aphasia: Methodological Considerations.

A variety of tDCS approaches has been used to investigate the potential of tDCS to improve language outcomes, or slow down the decay of language competences caused by Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA). The employed stimulation protocols and study designs in PPA are generally speaking similar to those deployed in post-stroke aphasic populations. These two etiologies of aphasia however differ substantially in their pathophysiology, and for both conditions the optimal stimulation paradigm still needs to be established.

Evaluating communication partner training in healthcare centres: Understanding the mechanisms of behaviour change.

Background: Communication between people with aphasia and their healthcare professionals (HCPs) can be greatly improved when HCPs are trained in using supportive conversation techniques and tools. Communication partner training (CPT) is an umbrella term that covers a range of interventions that train the conversation partners of people with aphasia. Several CPT interventions for HCPs have been developed and used to support HCPs to interact successfully with people with aphasia.

Oral and written picture description in individuals with aphasia.

Background: Aphasia is characterized by difficulties in connected speech/writing.

Aims: To explore the differences between the oral and written description of a picture in individuals with chronic aphasia (IWA) and healthy controls. Descriptions were controlled for productivity, efficiency, grammatical organization, substitution behaviour and discourse organization.

Cerebellar induced differential polyglot aphasia: A neurolinguistic and fMRI study.

Research has shown that linguistic functions in the bilingual brain are subserved by similar neural circuits as in monolinguals, but with extra-activity associated with cognitive and attentional control. Although a role for the right cerebellum in multilingual language processing has recently been acknowledged, a potential role of the left cerebellum remains largely unexplored. This paper reports the clinical and fMRI findings in a strongly right-handed (late) multilingual patient who developed differential polyglot aphasia, ataxic dysarthria and a selective decrease in executive function due to an ischemic stroke in the left cerebellum.

Apraxic agraphia following thalamic damage: Three new cases.

Apraxic agraphia (AA) is a so-called peripheral writing disorder following disruption of the skilled movement plans of writing while the central processes that subserve spelling are intact. It has been observed in a variety of etiologically heterogeneous neurological disorders typically associated with lesions located in the language dominant parietal and frontal region. The condition is characterized by a hesitant, incomplete, imprecise or even illegible graphomotor output.

The development of modern approaches to aphasia: a concise overview.

The aim of this article is to review the rationale on which modern aphasia test batteries are based. Since the mid-1950s, a starting point chosen because the discipline of speech (language) pathology was created during that period, a corpus of English aphasia tests was identified through searches of electronic databases. The tests were critically evaluated in terms of their theoretical roots and influences.

Constraint-induced aphasia therapy versus intensive semantic treatment in fluent aphasia.

Objective: The authors compared the effectiveness of 2 intensive therapy methods: Constraint-Induced Aphasia Therapy (CIAT; Pulvermüller et al., 2001) and semantic therapy (BOX; Visch-Brink & Bajema, 2001).

Method: Nine patients with chronic fluent aphasia participated in a therapy program to establish behavioral treatment outcomes.

Apraxic agraphia following bithalamic damage.

Objectives: Apraxic agraphia (AA) is a peripheral writing disorder generally considered to result from a causative lesion in the parietal and/or prefrontal lobe of the language dominant hemisphere (De Smet, Engelborghs, Paquier, De Deyn, & Mariën, 2011). De Smet et al. (2011), however, confirmed that AA might be associated with lesions outside the typical language areas such as the cerebellum or the thalamus.