Agrammatic aphasia (agrammatism), resulting from brain damage to regions of the brain involved in language processing, affects grammatical aspects of language. Therefore, research examining language breakdown (and recovery) patterns in agrammatism is of great interest and importance to linguists, neurolinguists, neuropsychologists, neurologists, psycholinguists and speech and language pathologists from all over the world. Research in agrammatism, studied across languages and from different perspectives, provides information about the grammatical structures that are affected by brain damage, their nature, and how language (and the brain) recovers from brain damage.
The chapters in this book focus on the symptoms that arise in agrammatic aphasia at the lexical, morphological and sentence level and address these impairments from neurolinguistic, neuropsychological and neurological perspectives. Special attention is given to methods for assessment and treatment of agrammatism and to the neurobiological changes that can result from the treatments.
Perspectives on Agrammatism provides an up-to-date overview of research that has been done over the past two decades. With contributions from the most influential aphasiologists from Europe and the United States, it provides an indispensable reference for students and academics in the field of language disorders.
"This volume is an excellent resource which provides an extensive coherent summary of the most essential issues and current developments in the field of aphasiology. … Valuable for students, clinicians, and researchers." - Michaela Nerantzini, University of Athens, Greece, in International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders
"This is an excellent, well conceived book about agrammatism with contributions from internationally recognised researchers. I will certainly be recommending this to scholars and researchers in the field and to students studying aphasia at an advanced level." - Susan Edwards, Professor Emerita, School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, UK
"The strength of Perspectives in Agrammatism is in its multidisciplinary approach, including a section on clinical perspectives. It is a creative and successful work which merges research and practical perspectives." - Claire Penn, Professor and Chair, Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
C. Thompson & R. Bastiaanse, Introduction to Agrammatism. R. Bastiaanse & R. Jonkers, Linguistic Accounts of Agrammatic Aphasia. D. Caplan, Resource Reduction Accounts of Syntactically Based Comprehension Disorders. S. Cappa, Neurological Accounts of Agrammatism. C. Luzzatti, S. Mondini, C. Semenza, Lexical Impairments C. Thompson, A. Kielar, S. Fix, Morphological Aspects of Agrammatic Aphasia. J. Niemi & M. Laine, Lexical, Inflectional, and Clitic Morphology: Evidence from an Agrammatic Aphasic Individual. R. De Bleser, F. Burchert, P. Holzinger, C. Weidlich Agrammatism at the Sentence Level: The Role of Morphology and Prosody. J. Webster & D. Howard, Assessment of Agrammatic Language. Y. Faroqi-Shah & C. Thompson, Approaches to Treatment of Agrammatism.
From being an area primarily on the periphery of mainstream behavioural and cognitive science, neuropsychology has developed in recent years into an area of central concern for a range of disciplines.
We are witnessing not only a revolution in the way in which brain-behaviour-cognition relationships are viewed, but also a widening of interest concerning developments in neuropsychology on the part of a range of workers in a variety of fields.
Major advances in brain-imaging techniques and the cognitive modelling of the impairments following brain injury promise a wider understanding of the nature of the representation of cognition and behaviour in the damaged and undamaged brain.
Neuropsychology is now centrally important for those working with brain-damaged people, but the very rate of expansion in the area makes it difficult to keep with findings from the current research.
The aim of the Brain, Behaviour and Cognition series is to publish a wide range of books that present comprehensive and up-to-date overviews of current developments in specific areas of interest.
These books will be of particular interest to those working with the brain-damaged. It is the editors' intention that undergraduates, postgraduates, clinicians and researchers in psychology, speech pathology, and medicine will find this series a useful source of information on important current developments.
The authors and editors of the books in the series are experts in their respective fields, working at the forefront of contemporary research. They have produced texts that are accessible and scholarly. We thank them for their contribution and their hard work in fulfilling the aims of the series.