Assessment and treatment of linguistic deficits in aphasic patients

Aphasia is a language disturbance caused by brain damage, usually a stroke. Aphasia has a large impact on a patient’s life, often turning everyday communicative situations into a struggle to understand and be understood. Improvement of these patients’ communicative ability in daily life is the main goal of aphasia therapy. The verbal communicative ability of aphasic patients may be disturbed by semantic (word meaning), phonological (word form) and/or syntactic (grammatical structure) deficits. Cognitive linguistic treatment aims to improve processing at the affected linguistic level, implicitly assuming that training of basic language skills will result in improved verbal communication. In this thesis, the relative impact of semantic and phonological deficits on verbal communication is explored. Furthermore, the results of both diagnostic and therapeutic studies in patients with aphasia after stroke are presented.