Exploring the processing continuum of single-word comprehension in aphasia.

This study investigated the vulnerability of lexical processing in individuals with aphasia. Though classical teaching of aphasia syndromes holds that people with Broca's aphasia have intact comprehension at the single-word level, the nature and extent of this purported sparing were explored under suboptimal processing conditions. A combination of acoustic distortions (low-pass filtering and time compression) was used to probe for "break points" in lexical comprehension in a group of individuals with aphasia.

Analyzing aphasia data in a multidimensional symptom space.

The utility of single-case vs. group studies has been debated in neuropsychology for many years. The purpose of the present study is to illustrate an alternative approach to group studies of aphasia, in which the same symptom dimensions that are commonly used to assign patients to classical taxonomies (fluency, naming, repetition, and comprehension) are used as independent and continuous predictors in a multivariate design, without assigning patients to syndromes.