Grammatical Disorders In Aphasia

Speech and language research for Broca's aphasia and more Grammatical Disorders in Aphasia: A Neurolinguistic Perspective reviews research by leading authorities to examine the relationships between language and the brain. Beginning with a comprehensive overview of linguistic theory and the neurolinguistic perspective, the following pages cover language perception and speech production after a variety of brain injuries. Topics include semantic composition, linguistic representation, verb finding, moving verbs, verb complexity and more, painting a comprehensive picture of language in the agrammatic patient.

This major reference work fills a need long recognized in neurolinguistics: a source for analyzable speech transcripts from agrammatic aphasic patients that provides detailed grammatical descriptions and distributional analyses. This 3-volume set is unique in that it presents narrative speech from carefully selected clinically comparable patients, speakers of 14 languages, and parallel narratives by normal speakers. For each of the 14 languages there is a case presentation chapter analyzing and discussing the language of agrammatic patients, followed by primary data, which are organized as follows: running text of speech by two patients; interlinear morphemic translations of those texts; running text of speech elicited from two normal control subjects (plus interlinear translations); tables and figures analyzing distributional properties of the patients' speech; results of comprehension tests of the patients; transcriptions of patients' oral reading and writing samples. Neurological information is included with the case presentations, and a short grammatical sketch of each language is added to make the work on all languages accessible even to those who only read English. Language findings are presented for English, Dutch, German, Icelandic, Swedish, French, Italian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Hindi, Finnish, Hebrew, Chinese and Japanese.The book is an indispensable reference work for all linguists, psycholinguists and neurolinguists who wish to test their theories against a massive body of data.

Agrammatism provides an overview of the state of knowledge on agrammatism, typically defined as a disorder of sentence production involving the selective omission of function words and some grammatical endings on words. The book opens with discussions of the diversity of the disorder. This is followed by separate chapters that address primarily questions of syntactic structure in agrammatism, from both linguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives. Within these two gross sections there is no consensus among the conclusions reached by the various authors. However, the position is taken that agrammatism is a disorder distinct from other aphasie disorders of sentence structure. This position is reconsidered in the final two chapters. Because of the intrinsically interdisciplinary character of research on agrammatism, it is hoped that the work presented in this volume will be of interest to linguists and psycholinguists working in areas outside the domain of aphasia, as well as to neurolinguists and neuropsychologists who are already involved in the study of language deficits.

Many children and adults experience impairment of their communication skills. These communication disorders impact adversely on all aspects of these individuals' lives. In thirty dedicated chapters, The Cambridge Handbook of Communication Disorders examines the full range of developmental and acquired communication disorders and provides the most up-to-date and comprehensive guide to the epidemiology, aetiology and clinical features of these disorders. The volume also examines how these disorders are assessed and treated by speech and language therapists and addresses recent theoretical developments in the field. The handbook goes beyond well-known communication disorders to include populations such as children with emotional disturbance, adults with non-Alzheimer dementias and people with personality disorders. Each chapter describes in accessible terms the most recent thinking and research in communication disorders. The volume is an ideal guide for academic researchers, graduate students and professionals in speech and language therapy.

“Non-fluent Aphasia in a Multilingual World” is an up-to-date introduction to the language of patients with non-fluent aphasia. Recent research in languages other than English has challenged our old descriptions of aphasia syndromes: while their patterns can be recognized across languages, the structure of each language has a profound effect on the symptoms of aphasic speech. However, the basic linguistic concepts needed to understand these effects in languages other than English have rarely been part of the training of the clinician. “Non-fluent Aphasia in a Multilingual World” introduces these concepts plainly and concretely, in the context of dozens of examples from the narratives and conversations of patients speaking most of the major languages of Europe, North America and Asia. Linguistic and clinical terms are carefully defined and kept as theory neutral as possible. “Non-Fluent Aphasia in a Multilingual World” is especially useful for speech-language pathologists whose patients are immigrants and guestworkers, and for the clinician who must deal creatively with the challenges of providing aphasia diagnosis and therapy in a multicultural, multidialectical setting.