Ambient experience in restitutive treatment of aphasia.

One of the greatest challenges to language rehabilitation is reconciling the fact that the same therapeutic intervention, provided to different individuals with similar types of stroke-induced aphasia, may result in divergent outcomes. In this paper, the authors reviewed existing literature to identify relevant ambient factors - those outside the control of the clinician - that may potentially influence functional language recovery in aphasia and response to treatment. The goal was to develop a clinical history-taking tool to assist clinicians in gathering information germane to each individual's unique circumstances and environment, elements that may have previously been underestimated, to provide a complete inventory of potentially potent prognostic factors.

Effects of semantic impairment on language use in Alzheimer's disease.

Many studies present apparently conflicting results and conclusions about the effects of Alzheimer's disease (AD) on language use. This review attempts to reconcile these apparently conflicting results regarding the language impairments in AD by discussing how the slow deterioration of the semantic system at the feature level interacts with the task demands of tests used to evaluate performance. In particular, performance is impaired on tasks that require relatively complete, elaborate semantic representations but is preserved when the task requires only partial semantic representations consisting largely of shared features.