The functional approach to the treatment of aphasia is embodied in the methods and techniques of Promoting Aphasic's Communicative Effectiveness (PACE), which has had an international influence on the way therapists approach the rehabilitation of aphasia patients. However, there is a shortage of research into the approach and little up-to-date practical guidance on its application. D. Carlomagno's concise book aims to provide a guide to the use and efficacy of PACE methodology which should be useful for aphasia therapists.
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 distinctive handbook is a key reference for both clinicians and researchers working in the scientific investigation of aphasia. The focus is on how the study of acquired language disorders has contributed to our understanding of normal language and its neural substrates, and to the clinical management of language disorders. The handbook is unique in that it reviews studies from the major disciplines in which aphasia research is conducted - cognitive neuropsychology, linguistics, neurology, neuroimaging, and speech-language pathology - as they apply to each topic of language. For each language domain (such as reading), there is a chapter devoted to theory and models of the language task, a chapter devoted to the neural basis of the language task (focusing on recent neuroimaging studies) and a chapter devoted to clinical diagnosis and treatment of impairments in that domain.
This is the first single-authored book to attempt to bridge the gap between aphasia research and the rehabilitation of patients with this language disorder. Studies of the deficits underlying aphasia and the practice of aphasia rehabilitation have often diverged, and the relationship between theory and practice in aphasiology is loose. The goal of this book is to help close this gap by making explicit the relationship between what is to be rehabilitated and how to rehabilitate it. Early chapters cover the history of aphasia and its therapy from Broca's discoveries to the 1970s, and provide a description of the classic aphasia syndromes. The middle section describes the contribution of cognitive neuropsychology and the treatment models it has inspired. It includes discussion of the relationship between the treatment approach and the functional model upon which it is based. The final chapters deal with aphasia therapy. After providing a sketch of a working theory of aphasia, Basso describes intervention procedures for disorders resulting from damage at the lexical and sentence levels as well as a more general conversation-based intervention for severe aphasics. Anna Basso has run an aphasia rehabilitation unit for more than thirty years. In this book she draws on her considerable experience to provide researchers, clinicians, and their students and trainees in speech-language pathology and therapy, aphasiology, and neuropsychology with comprehensive coverage of the evolution and state of the art of aphasia research and therapy.
It is now widely expected that scientific evidence and theory should be used to describe aphasia and aphasia therapy. This book provides review chapters on controversial research and clinical issues in aphasia and aphasia therapy. Contributions from distinguished scholars from all over the world (Europe, America, Australia) cover the range of disciplines involved in aphasia, including neurology of aphasia, cognitive and linguistic approaches to aphasic therapy, psychosocial approaches, aphasia research methodology, and efficacy of aphasia therapy. This book brings together contributions of all these disciplines and makes a link between theory and therapy from a scientific perspective. Each chapter offers a current review with extensive references, thus providing a useful resource for clinicians, students and researchers involved in aphasia and aphasic therapy including doctors, psychologists,linguists and speech and language therapists. The papers in this book were presented at the first European Research Conference on Aphasia.
This wide-ranging survey of the state of the art in clinical pragmatics includes an examination of pragmatic disorders in previously neglected populations such as juvenile offenders, children and adults with emotional and behavioural disorders, and adults with non-Alzheimer dementias. This book makes a significant contribution to the discussion of pragmatic disorders by exploring topics which have a fast-rising profile in the field. These topics include disorders in which there are both pragmatic and cognitive components, and studies of the complex impacts of pragmatic disorders such as mental health problems, educational disadvantage and social exclusion. This book also presents a critical evaluation of our current state of knowledge of pragmatic disorders. The author focuses on the lack of integration between theoretical and clinical branches of pragmatics and argues that the work of clinicians is all too often inadequately informed by theoretical frameworks. She attempts to bridge these gaps by pursuing a closer alliance of clinical and theoretical branches of pragmatics. It is claimed that this alliance represents the most promising route for the future development of the field. At once a yardstick measuring progress thus far in clinical pragmatics, and also a roadmap for future research development, this single-author volume defines where we have reached in the field, as well as where we have to go next.
Originally published in 1987, Aphasia Therapy surveys the approaches to aphasia treatment from throughout the world that have been taken both in the past and in the present day. The authors critically examine the assumptions underlying different approaches, and show their effects on modern clinical practices. Finally, the book offers new perspectives on some contemporary issues in aphasia therapy, the effectiveness of treatment, and the relationship between an analysis of a patient’s problems and the processes of treatment. Aphasia Therapy is divided into three parts: Part 1 illustrates some approaches to treatment in the period up to World War II – for instance, a didactic approach which emphasised the importance of repetition; the second part considers the different kinds of approaches to therapy that have developed since then – seven "schools" of treatment are identified; Part 3 considers whether there is evidence that treatment of aphasia is effective: the authors argue that in future, aphasia treatment must involve the development and evaluation of specific treatment methods that are theoretically motivated by a coherent analysis of the individual patient’s problems. Students, postgraduates, and practising clinicians in speech therapy will find this volume of great interest, as will neuropsychologists and clinical psychologists.
The ten volumes of Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thereby attempting to divide up its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical, cognitive, grammatical, social, cultural, discursive, variational, or interactional angles, this 9th volume focuses on what pragmatics is good for – beyond the very discipline of pragmatics as such. The chapters in the volume thus address the importance of taking a pragmatic perspective on traditional fields of applied linguistics (contrastive and error analysis, translation), and they address the core of pragmatics as the study of language use (with phenomena ranging from irony and emphasis to literacy and mass media, and with approaches to the function of language like rhetoric, stylistics, corpus analysis, and general semantics). The volume contains chapters not only on the spoken and written modes of communication, but also on signed language pragmatics and on computer-mediated communication. The impact and usefulness of taking a pragmatic perspective on language for a deeper understanding of clinical and rehabilitation practices has recently received ever more focus; in this volume, aspects of this direction of research are dealt with in the chapter on clinical pragmatics. In most of the chapters in the volume, ethics has a core role to play, not only in issues of authenticity in general in relation to research on language use, but also in issues that have a direct influence on the (linguistic) culture and society we live in, irrespective of whether we are part of a (linguistic) majority or a minority, or a minority within a minority: language policy and language planning, language ecology, and language in relation to legal matters. In all of these fields, we see the importance of research within pragmatics as a discipline dealing with how language influences our everyday lives. All in all, the volume presents different perspectives on how research in pragmatics not only can be put to practice, but how pragmatics is used as a tool to gain a better understanding of the world we live in.
Spreen and Risser present a comprehensive, critical review of available methods for the assessment of aphasia and related disorders in adults and children. The authors explore test instruments and approaches that have been used traditionally for the diagnosis of aphasia, ranging from bedside screening and ratings, to tests of specific aspects of language, and to comprehensive and psychometrically standardized aphasia batteries. Coverage of other methods reflects newer trends, including the areas of functional communication, testing of bilingual patients, psycholinguistic approaches, and pragmatic and discourse-related aspects of language in everyday life. The authors also examine the expansion of language assessment to individuals with non-aphasic neurological disorders, such as patients with traumatic brain injury, lesions of the right hemisphere, the healthy elderly, and invidulas with dimentia. Taking a flexible and empirical approach to the assessment process in their own clinical practice, Spreen and Risser review numerous test instruments and their source for professionals and students-in-training to choose from in their own use. The introductory chapters cover the history of aphasia assessment, a basic outline of subtypes of aphasia- both neuro-anatomically and psycholinguistically-, and the basic psychometric requirements for assessment instruments. The final part discusses issues in general clinical practice, specifically questions of test selection and interpretation. The book is a thorough and practical resource for speech and language pathologists, neuropsychologists, and their students and trainees.
