The Handbook of Adult Language Disorders

The Handbook of Adult Language Disorders is the essential guide to the scientific and clinical tenets of aphasia study and treatment. It focuses on how language breaks down after focal brain damage, what patterns of impairment reveal about normal language, and how recovery can be optimally facilitated. It is unique in that it reviews studies from the major disciplines in which aphasia research is conducted—cognitive neuropsychology, linguistics, neurology, neuroimaging, and speech-language pathology—as they apply to each topic of language. For each language domain, there are chapters devoted to theory and models of the language task, the neural basis of the language task (focusing on recent neuroimaging studies) and clinical diagnosis and treatment of impairments in that domain. In addition, there is broad coverage of approaches to investigation and treatment from leading experts, with several authors specializing in two or more disciplines. This second edition focuses on characterizing the cognitive and neural processes that account for each variant of aphasia as a first step toward developing effective rehabilitation, given that aphasia is one of the most common and disabling consequences of stroke.

The best and most authoritative handbook in the field, The Handbook of Adult Language Disorders is the definitive reference for clinicians and researchers working in the scientific investigation of aphasia.

Argye E. Hillis is a Professor of Neurology, with joint faculty appointments in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and in Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Hillis serves as the Executive Vice Chair of the Department of Neurology, and Director of the Cerebrovascular Division of Neurology. Prior to medical training and neurology residency, she trained in the fields of speech-language pathology and cognitive neuropsychology, spent a decade in rehabilitation of aphasia, and conducted clinical research focusing on understanding and treating aphasia. Her current research combines longitudinal task-related and task-free functional imaging and structural imaging from the acute stage of stroke through the first year of recovery, with detailed cognitive and language assessments to improve our understanding how language and other cognitive functions recover after stroke. Her other avenue of research involves developing novel treatment strategies for aphasia.