Handwriting revisited

he team of Jean-François Démonet was able to pinpoint this “channel” in the brain that connects orthographic information to the movements of handwriting.
This study is a first step towards understanding other contemporary forms of writing such as the use of keyboards, but also writing disorders in diseases as varied as Parkinson's disease, vascular aphasia or developmental dyslexia . Next ....

Aphasia Information and Treatment

Aphasia is a neurological disorder. Aphasia caused from damage to the parts of the brain that hold language. The amount of disability rely on the location and the severity of the brain damage that is the cause. Aphasia is most common in adults who have had a stroke. Brain tumors, infections, injuries and dementia can also cause. Other causes of brain injury are stern blows to the head, brain tumors, brain infections, and other conditions of the brain. Certain chronic neurological disorders, such as the epilepsy or the migraine, can also include the aphasia transient like symptom prodromal or episodical. Next...

2 PhD positions in Language & Interaction: Daily Dutch and Aphasic Dutch

The PhD positions are part of the NWO-funded Vidi research project “The Conversation Frame: Linguistic Forms and Communicative Functions in Discourse”, awarded to Dr. Esther Pascual. The program examines the relation between language, interaction and cognition, i.e. what Pascual calls ‘fictive interaction’. The main focus is on (intra-)sentential interactional structures –often expressed through direct speech– that reflect the conversational pattern of turn-taking. Examples are: “an attitude that says ‘what’s in it for me?’”, “a ‘what’s in it for me?’ attitude”. The language data will be daily and aphasic Dutch discourse from adult native speakers. The program is organized around two related PhD projects. We are inviting applications for one of these PhD projects.

Singing Could Aid Stroke Recovery

Stroke victims who can no longer speak may now be able to regain their ability to communicate through singing, according to a recent Harvard Medical School study.

HMS professor Gottfried Schlaug and his research team have seen promising signs in the preliminary results of their first clinical trial of melodic intonation therapy, which can circumvent the effects of aphasia, the loss of verbal communicati NEXT...

The retrieval and inflection of verbs in the spontaneous speech of fluent aphasic speakers

Fluent aphasia of the anomic and Wernicke’s type is characterized by word retrieval difficulties. However, in fluent aphasic speech, grammatical deviations have been observed as well. There is debate as to whether these grammatical problems are caused by the word retrieval deficit, by an additional grammatical deficit, or by an integration deficit.

Verbs are an interesting word class in this respect, because they are among the words that are hardest to retrieve for many fluent aphasic speakers and some forms require a considerable amount of grammatical computation. For production of a finite lexical verb, the lexical form and inflection for tense and agreement need to be integrated. Next....