Our paper on familiar collocations in Broca’s aphasia is published!

Bruns, C., Varley, R., Zimmerer, V.C., Carragher, M., Brekelmans, G., & Beeke, S. (2018). “I don’t know”: a usage-based approach to familiar collocations in non-fluent aphasia. Aphasiology. DOI: 10.1080/02687038.2018.1535692

When you talk to someone with Broca’s aphasia, you will find that they predominantly produce single words when trying to get their message across. Despite this non-fluent language output, however, you may also hear short phrases such as “I went to”, “I don’t know” or “it’s alright”. These phrases are a feature of everyone’s language ‘inventory’ – we use them all the time when we converse. It is interesting that individuals with Broca’s aphasia have difficulty to produce grammatical sentences, but that such familiar phrases seem to be preserved. Familiarity of phrases is important to my PhD work, and to this paper.