Linguistics And Aphasia

Linguistics and Aphasia is a major study of recent developments in applying psycholinguistics and pragmatics to the study of acquired language disorders (aphasia) and their remediation. Psycholinguistic analyses of aphasia interpret disorders in terms of damaged modules and processes within what was once a normal language system. These analyses have progressed to the point that they now routinely provide a model-based rationalefor planning patient therapy. Through a series of case studies, the authors show how the psycholinguistic analysis of aphasia can be assessed for its effectiveness in clinical practice. Pragmatic approaches to the study of aphasia are of more recent origin. Ruth Lesser and Lesley Milroy evaluate their considerable significance to the study of aphasia and their relevance to practical issues of diagnosis and treatment. Controversial analysis, in particular, offers a fruitful and productive framework within which to assess the functional adequacy of the language used by aphasic speakers in everyday contexts.

This groundbreaking work brings together leading scientist-practitioners to review what is known about aphasia and to relate current knowledge to treatment. Integrating traditional linguistic formulations with new insights derived from cognitive neuroscience, this volume explores the neuropsychological bases of both normal and pathologic language. It reflects an understanding of brain structure and function based on new developments in connectionist modeling and functional neuroimaging.

This volume presents a broad overview of current research and thought on aphasia in individuals who speak more than one language. The range of topics covered, and their in-depth treatment, should be of interest to researchers, clinicians, and students.

“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.

This book covers different aspects of speech and language pathology and it offers a fairly comprehensive overview of the complexity and the emerging importance of the field, by identifying and re-examining, from different perspectives, a number of standard assumptions in clinical linguistics and in cognitive sciences. The papers encompass different issues in phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, discussed with respect to deafness, stuttering, child acquisition and impairments, SLI, William’s Syndrome deficit, fluent aphasia and agrammatism. The interdisciplinary complexity of the language/cognition interface is also explored by focusing on empirical data from different languages: Bantu, Catalan, Dutch, English, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. The aim of this volume is to stress the growing importance of the theoretical and methodological linguistic tools developed in this area; to bring under scrutiny assumptions taken for granted in recent analyses, which may not be so obvious as they may seem; to investigate how even apparently minimal choices in the description of phenomena may affect the form and complexity of the language/cognition interface.

A comprehensive introduction to the emerging fields of neurolinguistics and linguistic aphasiology stresses concepts from the contributing disciplines of neurology, linguistics, psychology and speech.

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.