Rethinking biological mechanisms of aphasia recovery

About one third of people who have a stroke experience aphasia, a loss of language and communication ability that can have devastating consequences on a person's life. Most people with aphasia never fully recover, even with maximal medical care and speech-language therapy. A major goal of research is thus to understand the brain basis of aphasia recovery, with the hope that this information will lead to improved biologically based treatments. I will present recent neuroimaging studies testing specific hypotheses regarding the biological mechanisms that might underlie changes in language networks after stroke. The results challenge some commonly held ideas regarding the brain basis of aphasia recovery.