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.

Assessment of neglect dyslexia with functional reading materials.

Background: Spatial neglect is a neurocognitive disorder that affects perception, representation, and/or motor planning. Neglect dyslexia in spatial neglect after right hemisphere damage may co-occur with, or be dissociated from, other spatial neglect signs. Previous neglect dyslexia research focused on word-level stimuli and reading errors.

Effects of language proficiency and language of the environment on aphasia therapy in a multilingual.

We examined the relative proficiency of four languages (Spanish, German, French, English) of a multilingual speaker with aphasia, JM. JM's self-rated proficiency was consistent with his naming accuracy for nouns and verbs (The Object and Action Naming Battery, Druks & Masterson, 2000) and with his performance on selected subtests of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (Paradis & Libben, 1987). Within and between-language changes were measured following two periods of language treatment, one in a highly-proficient language (Spanish) and one in a less-proficient language (English).

The development of stimulus-specific auditory responses requires song exposure in male but not female zebra finches.

Juvenile male zebra finches develop their song by imitation. Females do not sing but are attracted to males' songs. With functional magnetic resonance imaging and event-related potentials we tested how early auditory experience shapes responses in the auditory forebrain of the adult bird.

Functional MRI of the zebra finch brain during song stimulation suggests a lateralized response topography.

Electrophysiological and activity-dependent gene expression studies of birdsong have contributed to the understanding of the neural representation of natural sounds. However, we have limited knowledge about the overall spatial topography of song representation in the avian brain. Here, we adapt the noninvasive functional MRI method in mildly sedated zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) to localize and characterize song driven brain activation.