[Psycholinguistic aspects of aphasia diagnosis and therapy]

Abstract

A central goal of psycholinguistic research on the diagnosis and therapy of aphasic patients consists of the construction of a series of language tasks which a. can provide guidelines for the development of systematic therapy programs and b. are suited to the evaluation of the recovery process in aphasia, in particular the effectiveness of speech therapy. Since current aphasia tests fall short on both points, a number of requirements are discussed which an aphasia test should minimally meet in order to satisfy the above objectives. Some of these requirements are illustrated in the light of the preliminary results of the Amsterdam Aphasia Test (AAT).