From the Inner Circle to Rebuilding Social Networks

Researchers from Speech Pathology, within the School of Allied Health at Australia’s La Trobe University, have published the results of a longitudinal investigation into the impacts of acquired aphasia on the social networks of stroke survivors. The study focuses on documenting how communicative deficits disrupt the close personal relationships of person with aphasia (PWA) following…

The Narrative-Based Evolution of a Stakeholder-Engaged Research Team

In work partly supported by an Engagement Award from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, six speech-language pathologists (SLP) with an interest in understanding aphasia recovery processes collaborated with a Ph.D. stroke survivor with aphasia to investigate how close attention to the post-stroke biographical narratives of persons with aphasia (PWA) – as well as of investigative…

Perceived Factors That Facilitate or Prevent the Use of Speech-Generating Devices in Bilingual Individuals With Aphasia

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) from the academy, a clinical service-delivery business, and the AAC manufacturer Lingraphica collaborated on a study of perceptions of practicing SLP clinicians regarding the use of speech-generating devices (SGDs) in rehabilitating bilingual clients with aphasia.  Their aim was to identify and characterize the main factors perceived by respondents either to hinder, or…

The role of verbal short-term memory in complex sentence comprehension: an observational study on aphasia

Researchers from universities and medical facilities in Italy (Milan, Trento) and France (Paris) have collaborated to compare comprehension performance in persons with agrammatic and fluent aphasias when presented with sentences of varying syntactic structures and challenge levels.  The researchers focused on how phonological short-term memory (pSTM) interacts with syntactic complexity to affect sentence comprehension in…

COVID-19 and Aphasia

A communication specialist from Hong Kong University’s Academic Unit of Human Communication, Development, and Information Sciences has published an article that discusses what clinicians have learned about relationships between the COVID-19 virus and aphasia. Because COVID-19 is a novel virus, highly contagious, and – in long covid – observed to compromise disparate organs and functional…

Analysis of Real-World Language Use in a Person With Wernicke’s Aphasia

Speech-language pathologists in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences at the University of Connecticut report results of a pilot study using the Language Environment Analysis technology (LENA) to capture and analyze real-world samples of language use from a person with aphasia (PWA) before and after intensive language therapy. The authors goals were: [1]…