Language

David Caplan is Associate Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, Adjunct Associate Professor in the Departments of Neurology and Communication at Boston University, Associate Neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.

Part 1 Introduction: language processing and its role in communication; disorders of language processing and hteir functional consequences; the languages; the language code; models of language processing; psycholinguistic analyses of language disorders. Part 2 Recognition of spoken words: the sound structure of words; processing the acoustic signal for phonetic features and phonological segments; auditory word recognition; disturbanes of auditory functioning; disturbances of acoustic-phonetic processing; acoustic-phonetic processing and disturbances of lexical access and comprehension; disturbances of auditory word recognition. Part 3 The meanings of words: the classical view of concepts and challenges to this view; alternative models of concepts; core concepts and identification procedures; modality-specific representations of concepts; semantic deficits. Part 4 Production of spoken words: oral production of words; disturbances of word sound production. Part 5 Reading and writing single words: orthographic representations; processing written language; acquired dyslexias; agraphia; the role of phonological codes in writing sentences; independence of reading and writing; peripheral mechanisms. Part 6 Recognizing and producing morphologically complex words: word formation in English; processing morphological form; disturbances of processing morphologically complex words. Part 7 Sentence comprehension: sentence meaning and its relationship to syntactic structures; alternative accounts of sentence structure; processes involved in sentence comprehension; disorders of sentence comprehension. Part 8 Sentence production: models of sentence production; disorders of sentence production. Part 9 Comprehension and production of discourse: the structure of discourse; processing discourse structures; disorders affecting the production and comprehension of discourse-level structures. Part 10 Brief notes on issues relating to diagnosis and treatment of language disorders: a psycholinguistic approach to the assessment of language disorders; the psycholinguistic assessment of language; the psycholinguistic assessment of language - identification of deficits in language processing components; classification of patients with language disorders; neurological mechanisms and aphasia; the relevance of linguistics and psycholinguistics to therapeutics.