Animal-Assisted Intervention in Speech-Language Pathology: Practical, Clinical, and Theoretical Considerations.

Interest in animal-assisted interventions within the field of communication sciences and disorders is growing. As more clinicians become interested in engaging in animal-assisted therapy (AAT) and more researchers begin to study its potential benefits, it will be critical for all stakeholders to demonstrate knowledge of the standards and qualifications for service delivery as well as the challenges that must be met in developing an evidence base for clinical practice. This review highlights some of the foundational information relevant to AAT in the context of speech-language pathology.

Verbal Description of Concrete Objects: A Method for Assessing Semantic Circumlocution in Persons With Aphasia.

Purpose: We investigated from a theoretically motivated perspective what information differentiated sufficient from insufficient descriptions of objects provided by persons with aphasia.

Method: Twenty-one adults with aphasia consequent to single left-hemisphere stroke verbally described 9 living and 9 nonliving objects. Responses were scored for accuracy (i.

What matters in semantic feature processing for persons with stroke-aphasia: Evidence from an auditory concept-feature verification task.

Background: The relationship between object concept domains (living vs. nonliving) and their underlying feature structures is a frequent area of investigation regarding semantic processing in healthy individuals and some individuals with neuropsychological impairment resulting from herpes simplex encephalitis, semantic dementia and Alzheimer's disease. However, this relationship has been less well-investigated in persons with stroke-aphasia (PWA), even though many treatments for anomia following stroke are predicated on the use of semantic feature cues.

Lexicality Effects in Word and Nonword Recall of Semantic Dementia and Progressive Nonfluent Aphasia.

Background: Verbal working memory is an essential component of many language functions, including sentence comprehension and word learning. As such, working memory has emerged as a domain of intense research interest both in aphasiology and in the broader field of cognitive neuroscience. The integrity of verbal working memory encoding relies on a fluid interaction between semantic and phonological processes.

Modulating the focus of attention for spoken words at encoding affects frontoparietal activation for incidental verbal memory.

Attention is crucial for encoding information into memory, and current dual-process models seek to explain the roles of attention in both recollection memory and incidental-perceptual memory processes. The present study combined an incidental memory paradigm with event-related functional MRI to examine the effect of attention at encoding on the subsequent neural activation associated with unintended perceptual memory for spoken words. At encoding, we systematically varied attention levels as listeners heard a list of single English nouns.

A lifespan perspective on semantic processing of concrete concepts: does a sensory/motor model have the potential to bridge the gap?

Research regarding semantic knowledge of objects is often conducted independently in children and adults. Review of these bodies of evidence suggests that the two literatures are often complementary. It seems critical to determine what we can learn from a developmental perspective, toward the common goal of understanding semantic organization.

Anomia as a marker of distinct semantic memory impairments in Alzheimer's disease and semantic dementia.

Objective: Many neurologically constrained models of semantic memory have been informed by two primary temporal lobe pathologies: Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Semantic Dementia (SD). However, controversy persists regarding the nature of the semantic impairment associated with these patient populations. Some argue that AD presents as a disconnection syndrome in which linguistic impairment reflects difficulties in lexical or perceptual means of semantic access.

Cortical and subcortical contributions to the attentive processing of speech.

The neuroanatomical correlates of attentive listening were investigated with functional magnetic resonance imaging and an attention task in which listeners responded only to words that combined two specific attributes of voice and semantic content. This task was performed under two different attentive listening conditions: (i) diotically, with words presented sequentially, and (ii) dichotically, with male and female voices presented simultaneously but segregated to different ears. For both conditions, functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed bihemispheric but right-lateralized activity patterns in mid-prefrontal, anterior cingulate, and inferior parietal areas, as well as significant anterior insular and subcortical activation.

Semantic memory and language processing: a primer.

Semantic memory refers to our long-term knowledge of word and object meaning. There is increasing evidence that rather than being a passive warehouse of knowledge, semantic memory is a dynamic system whose effectiveness relies on the coordination of multiple components distributed across a large network of cortical regions. Damage to one or more of these components produces distinct profiles of impairment in aphasia and dementia.

Lexical retrieval and semantic knowledge in patients with left inferior temporal lobe lesions.

BACKGROUND: It has been proposed that anomia following left inferior temporal lobe lesions may have two different underlying mechanisms with distinct neural substrates. Specifically, naming impairment following damage to more posterior regions (BA 37) has been considered to result from a disconnection between preserved semantic knowledge and phonological word forms (pure anomia), whereas anomia following damage to anterior temporal regions (BAs 38, 20/21) has been attributed to the degradation of semantic representations (semantic anomia). However, the integrity of semantic knowledge in patients with pure anomia has not been demonstrated convincingly, nor were lesions in these cases necessarily confined to BA 37.