Treatment of metaphor interpretation deficits subsequent to traumatic brain injury.

Objective: To improve oral interpretation of metaphors by patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Design: Both single subject experimental design and group analysis.

Setting: Patients' homes.

Treating Metaphor Interpretation Deficits Subsequent to Right Hemisphere Brain Damage: Preliminary Results.

PURPOSE: This investigation sought to determine whether a structured intervention focused on improving use of semantic associations could improve patients' ability to provide oral interpretations of metaphors following Right Hemisphere Damage (RHD). METHODS: Principles of single subject experimental design provided the basis for the study. Five patients received either 10 or 20 baseline assessments of oral metaphor interpretation and, as a control, assessments of line orientation skill.

Training and generalization of expressive syntax in nonfluent aphasia.

Generalization of treatment effects remains a consistent goal of clinicians who treat aphasic adults. Specifically, various types of stimulus/response generalization designs are available, depending on the level of generalization desired. We have reviewed training matrices designed to elicit gestural subject-plus-verb targets and treatment studies designed to answer more global questions regarding treatment efficacy.

Reversed lateralization of cognitive functions in right handers. Exceptions to classical aphasiology.

Most current and past research on the cerebral organization of cognitive functions has presupposed certain specialized hemisphere operations. At least for right handers, language and praxis are to be organized in the left hemisphere, while affective prosody, configurational spatial capacity, and global attention are lateralized in the right hemisphere. Deviations from these presuppositions, as in crossed aphasics and perhaps left handers, are generally considered to be 'exceptions' and either to disprove the rules or to be irrelevant to the rule.