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...

Even if, in recent years, the study of language disorders in brain-damaged patients has been strongly influenced by models and experimental paradigms of cognitive neuropsychology, much less relevant has been the impact of this new approach to language rehabilitation. Contrasting opinions exist on this subject among clinicians and researchers. Some authors maintain that cognitive neuropsychology has not changed and will not change the treatment of aphasia. Other authors adopt a less pessimistic attitude, either reporting empirical data that support this viewpoint, or trying to define more...

Theory and research in aphasiology have typically concentrated on a limited population--right-handed adult monolinguals whose language uses an alphabetic code. Bilingual individuals, ideographical code users, and children (among others) have been separated out. This book examines the available data from these "atypical" aphasics, asking whether what makes them different has a significant effect on language representation and processing in the brain. Each chapter reviews literature pertinent to a given population and explores whether (and potentially how) these populations differ from the...