Aphasia: Acquired language and speech disorder

Aphasia is an acquired neurogenic language disorder that was documented by early cognitive neurologists in the 1800's. The most common causes are stroke and neurodegenerative disease and it can have very severe negative effects on quality of life. Both post-stroke aphasia and neurodegenerative (primary progressive) aphasia can be classified into distinct subtypes that reflect the functional and neural sub-systems that support language processing: phonology, semantics, and fluent sentence planning/production. Aphasia treatments are based on speech language therapy and can produce clinically significant benefits, though generalization from the clinic context to real-world communication remains a challenge. Traditional speech language therapy can also be enhanced with non-invasive brain stimulation and with at-home computer-based administration.