Authors: Lieke A. Heijmans is an undergraduate student at the Linguistics program of the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Adrià Rofes is associate professor in Neurolinguistics at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Losing the ability to speak doesn’t always mean losing the ability to communicate. For many people living with aphasia (i.e., a language […]
Have you ever found yourself spending five minutes talking to someone and suddenly using their words instead of your own? Say, for example, that you usually say “couch” but now suddenly you call it “sofa.” You say “TV,” but suddenly it’s “the telly.” You’ve never in your life referred to dinner as “tea” but after […]
If you speak more than one language, you are probably familiar with not being able to sound like a native speaker. At least, you know you’re trying your best to speak a foreign language! And, you know, in the end, your accent is also part of your identity. But wouldn’t it feel quite discouraging if […]
I n a 2017 interview, the famous actress Kate Walsh – whom you may know from the TV show Grey’s anatomy – reported the following: “ I started having more cognitive difficulties. It felt like aphasia [language problems] , but it was not just not being able to find words; I would lose my train […]
Do you remember the “Little Red Riding Hood” story – the beloved fairy tale that your parents used to read to you before bed? Besides putting you and many other children across the globe to sleep, this story is a great “spontaneous speech” resource to assess language impairments in people with neurological disorders. An interesting […]
Verbal fluency tests are one of the most widely used tests in neuropsychology . The oral form of the test that is used today was first introduced by Benton and colleagues in the 1960’s and is mainly administered for evaluation of subjects sus pected of having neurological damage . Administration of fluency tests is fast, simple […]
If you feel stuck for words every once in a while, the most straightforward answer is that there is nothing wrong with you. Fifty years ago, Roger Brown and David McNeill at Harvard University showed that it is possible to trigger “a state in which one cannot quite recall a familiar word but can recall […]
The number of people who speak one language (monolinguals) is rather small today , with many of us growing up with more than one language or learning another one during our lifetime. Language experts argue that what counts as speaking two languages (bilingualism) is not only a matter of the number of languages we speak […]
The usage of the words “Eskimo” and “Inuit” is one of these cases in which, all of a sudden, we are told we have been saying something wrong all along. Lawrence Kaplan from the Alaska Native Language Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks explained that the words “Eskimo” and “Inuit” do not mean the […]
People who are diagnosed with dementia may initially report problems on memory and/or language that affect their activities of daily living. Once factors such as depression, delirium, or mild cognitive impairment, are disregarded, these people are typically referred to a neurologist, radiologist, and neuropsychologist or speech therapist who will help them to understand the reason […]