Aphasia and Interdisciplinarity

AbstractAphasia is an acquired language impairment, which occurs due to a brain damage. In receptive aphasia speech production is more fluent but less meaningful. In expressive aphasia, the patient's intellect might be intact, but speech production severely damaged. In either case the psychosocial impact of this condition is significant. Although, there are several studies on aphasia in medicine, psychology and linguistics, the latter is rarely involved in researching aphasia by medical teams. A recent survey on awareness of aphasia involving 226 Romanian respondents (154 with medical background) showed that only one physician was aware that linguistics also has aphasia as a research focus. This paper describes how we see collaboration between linguistics and other fields of specialities interested in researching aphasia. Medicine and Linguistics Medical imaging could be particularly helpful in mapping how the adjacent areas of the damaged language centre of the brain overtake lost functions for a visual understanding of speech activation in aphasics. Psychology and Linguistics: According to the biopsychosocial approach, therapeutic methods could be tailored according to functions of the nervous system of the individual, which would improve the efficiency of the applied therapy. Information Technology and Linguistics: Assistive technology consists of computers and related devices to aid aphasics’ communication and the relearning process. Speech analysis by PRAAT, a free computer software, shows that emotional elements can play the role of facilitating factors in the communication of aphasics. Conclusions In spite of the vast literature on aphasia we found little evidence of collaborative work among medicine, psychology, information technology and linguistics. Joint efforts may produce better results in understanding aphasia and subsequently can help to construct more productive methods for the benefit of these patients