Proper name anomia and proper name sparing are unusual disorders characterized by a selective inability, or sparing, to retrieve proper names as opposed to common names. They may eventually demonstrate that these two categories of names are independently processed in the brain at the semantic or lexical/orthographic level. Yet, differences in patient assessment make comparison between cases dif...

Introduction Constrain Induced Language Therapy (CILT) has spurred discussion of treatment “intensity” in aphasia research, as clinicians and researchers began asking about the important features of CILT, and whether the principle of massed practice was in fact the driving force behind the treatment technique. However, as studies began addressing intensity of treatment, the need for consistent ...

First a review of recent studies of the monthly and weekly distribution of suicide is given. Then the results of an analysis of the mortality figures for Lower Saxony from 1968 to 1977 are presented in which age, sex and means of suicide are taken into consideration. The monthly distribution of all suicides (ICD8 E950-E958) shows a maximum incidence in spring and early summer and a minimum in w...

Existing empirical data on proper names processing are critically reviewed in trying to understand which tasks may involve the left temporal pole, which proper name related functions are supported by this structure and eventually offer some speculations about why these functions might have developed in this location in the course of human evolution. While clinical group studies support the idea...

PURPOSE To create two matched short forms of the Philadelphia Naming Test (PNT; Roach, Schwartz, Martin, Grewal, & Brecher, 1996) that yield similar results to the PNT for measuring anomia. METHOD In Study 1, archived naming data from 94 individuals with aphasia were used to identify which PNT items should be included in the short forms. The 2 constructed sets of 30 items, PNT30-A and PNT30-B...

This investigation examined the effects of a semantic feature training procedure on retrieval of action names in a participant with anomic aphasia. Treatment was applied sequentially across two sets of action names in the context of a multiple baseline design across behaviors. Treatment effects were evaluated in terms of naming of trained and untrained actions. Discourse production effects were...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Recent research suggests that increased left hemisphere cortical activity, primarily of the left frontal cortex, is associated with improved naming performance in stroke patients with aphasia. Our aim was to determine whether anodal transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS), a method thought to increase cortical excitability, would improve naming accuracy in stroke p...