Transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) combined with a language intervention shows benefit in improving language rehabilitation in two types of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) for up to 2 months, new research suggests.
For the last 70 years, it was largely believed that spatial processing disorders, including those seen in language, occurred when the temporal-parietal-occipital (TPO) junction of the brain's left hemisphere was damaged. But according to researchers from the HSE Neurolinguistics Laboratory, it is the damages to the axonal fibers connected to this area of the brain that are most important. Nearly 70 years ago, the renowned Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria added
semantic aphasia to his classification of language disorders, demonstrating that inability to establish logical relations between words in a sentence corresponds to non-linguistic (spatial processing) disorders as well.
An international research team led by Carnegie Mellon University has found that when the brain "reads" or decodes a sentence in English or Portuguese, its neural activation patterns are the same.
Flick through any neuropsychology textbook and you'll hear about the nineteenth century pioneers Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke, who showed that language production and comprehension are subserved by two distinct brain regions, which came to be known as Broca's and Wernicke's area, respectively.
It is well established that persons with aphasia (PWA) exhibit impaired performance on assessments not only of language function but also of cognitive skills, including attention processing. Attention is a particularly important cognitive skill to examine in aphasia because of its fundamental, domain-general nature, as well as the fact that a link between attention deficits and language deficits in this population has been proposed in previous work.
New research suggests living a healthier lifestyle could also increase executive function, which is the ability to exert self-control, set and meet goals, resist temptation and solve problems. In effect, the study suggests a feedback loop exists where greater executive function enables people to lead a healthier lifestyle, which in turn, improves their executive function.
A gifted singer who was locked in silence for six years after suffering a stroke has found her voice again with the help of a special choir.
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Researchers track severely brain injured woman to reveal biological process of recovery
A severely brain injured woman, who recovered the ability to communicate using her left eye, restored connections and function of the areas of her brain responsible for producing expressive language and responding to human speech, according to new research from Weill Cornell Medicine scientists.
