Austrian Academy of Sciences

Department of Linguistics and Communication Research

Our research focuses on the analysis of language test and therapy data produced by persons with aphasia. In our different projects, longitudinal investigations in the form of single case and group studies of persons with aphasia are carried out. On the sentence level the data are compared to those of healthy control persons. The main topics of these investigations are oral sentence and text production, verbal-communicative abilities, retrieval and production of verbs and nouns. Intensive language therapy programs on the word-, sentence- and text-level (discourse and dialogue-training) have been provided on an intensive basis. Particular emphasis is on the recovery of language functions. To date, the provision of linguistically structured, intensive language therapy protocols has resulted in improved language performance and transfer from trained to untrained modalities and overall improvement in verbal communicative abilities.