Foundations of Aphasia Rehabilitation

The purpose of this book is to provide students of language rehabilitation and professional language pathologists with an overview of the theoretical foundations of their field of endeavour - that is, with the rationale behind what speech therapists have been doing over the past decades, and with pointers indicating the direction in which current theoretical principles are steering the field. Most chapters contain a detailed review of the relevant literature. In addition, the chapters on the classification of rehabilitation methods (Chapter 1) and on their linguistic foundations (Chapter 4) are followed by an extensive appendix that summarizes respectively 42 and 60 studies. Because language rehabilitation must be built on multidisciplinary foundations, linguistic analyses are complemented by cognitive, neurofunctional, neurophysiological and neuroanatomical considerations. The book stresses the fact that theoretical beliefs about the nature of language representations, language processing, and aphasia, change over time and that, consequently, so do aphasia rehabilitation procedures. This text should be of interest to students of language therapy and professional language pathologists. It should also be of interest to aphasiologists, applied psycholinguists, neurolinguists and cognitive psychologists.