In the past few years, noninvasive cerebral stimulations have been used to modulate language task performance in healthy and aphasic patients. In this study, a dual transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on anterior and posterior language areas was applied for 2 weeks to a patient with a possible crossed aphasia following a right hemisphere stroke. Inhibitory cathodal stimulation of the right Brodmann areas (BA) 44/45 and simultaneous anodal stimulation of the left BA 44/45 improved the patient's performance in picture naming. Conversely, the same bilateral montage on BA 39/40 did not produce any significant improvement; finally, electrode polarity inversion over BA 39/40 yielded a further improvement compared with the first anterior stimulation. Our findings suggest that ipsilesional and contralesional areas could be useful in poststroke functional reorganization and provide new evidences for the therapeutic value of tDCS in aphasia.

A primary goal of working memory research has been to understand the mechanisms that permit working memory systems to effectively maintain the identity and order of the elements held in memory for sufficient time as to allow for their selection and transfer to subsequent processing stages. Based on the performance of two individuals with acquired dysgraphia affecting orthographic WM (the graphemic buffer) we present evidence of two distinct and dissociable functions of orthographic WM. One function is responsible for maintaining the temporal stability of letters held in orthographic WM, while the other is responsible for maintaining their representational distinctiveness. The failure to maintain temporal stability and representational distinctiveness give rise, respectively, to decay and interference effects that manifest themselves in distinctive error patterns, including distinct serial position effects. The findings we report have implications beyond our understanding of orthographic WM, as the need to maintain temporal stability and representational distinctiveness in WM is common across cognitive domains.

Our findings provide new evidence for the therapeutic use of tDCS in degenerative diseases, suggesting that an explorative study can be useful for targeting the more appropriate stimulation site, and confirm the involvement of right-sided areas associated with language activities.

No abstract

Objetivo: O objetivo deste estudo foi avaliar se a fisioterapia em ambiente hospitalar melhora a funªo do membro superior (MS) acometido em pacientes aps acidente vascular encefÆlico, e os objetivos secundÆrios foram avaliar a fora muscular (FM) e a sensibilidade deste membro. MØtodo: Participaram do estudo 8 pacientes com diagnstico de AVE isquŒmico. Estes receberam fisioterapia padronizada para o MS durante o perodo de internaªo no Hospital Sªo Paulo, duas vezes por dia. Todos foram avaliados atravØs das escalas de Fugl-Meyer modificada e de FM do Medical Research Council em dois momentos: antes e aps o tratamento fisioterapŒutico, a fim de obter dados comparativos de forma quantitativa em relaªo funªo motora e sensibilidade, e fora muscular do MS respectivamente. Resultados: Seis pacientes apresentaram melhora da fora muscular e da funªo do MS, e cinco dos sete pacientes que apresentavam alteraªo da sensibilidade, apresentaram melhora aps o tratamento fisioterÆpico. Conclusªo: Desta forma a fisioterapia pode ser considerada de grande valia na reabilitaªo precoce de indivduos hemiparØticos hospitalizados, proporcionando a estes melhora da funªo motora, sensibilidade e fora muscular. No entanto os pacientes plØgicos foram os menos beneficiados com o tratamento.

Conflict of interest: non-existent in the areas that are responsible for understandable and / or expression, oral and / or written language 1,2 .In aphasia, all the aspects of language that were mentioned before are affected, however, that does not indicate a disease but rather a multimodal neurophysiologic disorder that is manifested by difficulties in reading, speaking and / or even writing together with changes in terms of behavior, intellectual and emotional spheres, attitudes and persona-lity³. Aphasic individuals can present since a slight language change, such as anomia (difficulty of evoking or emitting names) to more severe changes, like losing the ability of emitting any linguistic signal 4 .The impairment caused by aphasia varies depending on the location and extent of the lesion. The higher the affected brain region is, the greater is the risk of sequelae. In relation to the location, one author states that 95% of right handed and 75% of the left handed individuals specialize the left hemisphere (LH) for language, being that, then, ABSTRACTThe purpose of this article was doing a report case of an aphasic client subjected to speech therapy in the clinic of a Speech Pathology and Audiology course of a federal university. The studied subject is a male patient, aged 68, treated in the clinic since May 2009. His therapeutic process was analyzed up to December 2010. The client suffered an ischemic stroke in the left cerebral hemisphere, on January 2009, when suddenly presented mutism. After the evaluations, the therapist concluded that the client presented "aphasia, compromising the oral and the writing expression, caused by ischemic stroke". So, the treatment plan was created. Since the start of therapy, significant linguistic changes could be observed in the client. A primary factor for the satisfactory recover was the quick search for the speech treatment (15 days after the stroke), because there is a degree of spontaneous recovery in aphasic clients. But, the good results are minimal without the adequate therapy. Only one month after the beginning of the therapy, the client improved substantially his vocabulary. Despite the injury area is extensive and fundamental to the language, it was observed very positive results with the therapy. So, we believe that the early speech therapy contributed a lot to the linguistic recover, since the client communicate satisfactorily, if we consider the great extension of his injury.

The stopping repair strategy is more frequent in the most severe degrees of phonological disorder. This strategy is used similarly by children with phonological disorders, with regards to the affected phonemes.

OBJETIVO: descrever e comparar os padrões de fluência da fala de crianças com e sem desvio fonológico evolutivo. MÉTODOS: a amostra foi constituída de 20 sujeitos com idades entre 4:6 e 7:6 anos, sendo 10 crianças com diagnóstico de desvio fonológico evolutivo e 10 com desenvolvimento fonológico típico. Os sujeitos de ambos os grupos foram submetidos a uma avaliação da fluência da fala que faz parte do Teste de Linguagem Infantil-ABFW. Com base neste protocolo, analisaram-se as tipologias das rupturas do fluxo de fala, as quais são classificadas como disfluências comuns e disfluências gagas. Foi realizado o cálculo da freqüência de rupturas da fala e da porcentagem de disfluências gagas. Por meio deste teste também se analisou a velocidade de fala, medindo-se o fluxo de palavras e de sílabas por minuto. RESULTADOS: não houve diferença estatisticamente significante entre os grupos quanto às variáveis analisadas. Contudo, pode-se perceber que o grupo com desvio fonológico evolutivo apresentou maiores médias do que o grupo com desenvolvimento fonológico típico na maioria das variáveis, com exceção do fluxo de sílabas e palavras por minuto. Quanto à velocidade de fala, no que se refere ao fluxo de sílabas por minuto houve uma tendência de um menor fluxo no grupo com desvio fonológico evolutivo. CONCLUSÃO: no grupo estudado, crianças com desvios fonológicos evolutivos e crianças com desenvolvimento fonológico típico não diferem quanto aos aspectos de fluência de suas falas.