Aphasia is an “acquired disorder of previously intact language ability secondary to brain disease.” 1 Aphasia may affect the production of, or comprehension of, speech, as well as the ability to read or write. According to current accepted estimates, one million people in the United States and an additional one million in the rest of the world have aphasia. Most of these people have acquired ap...

In this theoretical paper, we argue that the adoption of the social model to aphasia rehabilitation within group settings changes the metaphorical location of the boundaries between clinicians and clients. Despite a growing literature on group work for aphasia and social model applications for people with chronic aphasia, there has been almost no attention paid to how professional boundaries ar...

Research about the effectiveness of communicative supports and advances in photographic technology has prompted changes in the way speech-language pathologists design and implement interventions for people with aphasia. The purpose of this paper is to describe the use of photographic images as a basis for developing communication supports for people with chronic aphasia secondary to sudden-onse...

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 ...

The concept of living successfully with aphasia has recently emerged as an alternative to more traditional "deficit" models in aphasiology, encouraging a focus on positive rather than negative outcomes. This research aimed to integrate findings from studies exploring the perspectives of three participant groups (individuals with aphasia, speech-language pathologists, and family members) about l...

Wernicke's aphasia occurs after a stroke to classical language comprehension regions in the left temporoparietal cortex. Consequently, auditory-verbal comprehension is significantly impaired in Wernicke's aphasia but the capacity to comprehend visually presented materials (written words and pictures) is partially spared. This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the n...

The AHCPR Post-Stroke Rehabilitation Clinical Practice Guidelines defines aphasia as "the loss of ability to communicate orally, through signs, or in writing, or the inability to understand such communications; the loss of language usage ability." It has been reported that aphasia is one of the most common consequences of stroke in both the acute and chronic phases. Acutely, it is estimated tha...

The purpose of this study was to analyze the question: how do people with aphasia experience the world? Three questions are approached: (1) how is behavior controlled in aphasia, considering that a normal linguistic control is no longer available; (2) what is the pattern of intellectual abilities in aphasia; and (3) what do aphasia patients' self-report regarding the experience of living withou...

BACKGROUND Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a degenerative disease that presents as progressive decline of language ability with preservation of other cognitive functions in the early stages. Three subtypes of PPA are known: progressive nonfluent aphasia, semantic dementia, and logopenic aphasia (LPA). PATIENTS AND METHODS We report the case of a 77-year-old patient with PPA whose clinica...