Improving Aphasia Using Electrical Brain Stimulation

Language and communication are essential for almost every aspect of human life, but for people who have aphasia, a language processing disorder that can occur after stroke or brain injury, even simple conversations can become a formidable challenge. Speech and language therapy can help people recover their language ability, but often requires months or even years of therapy before a person is able to overcome these challenges. This research will investigate non-invasive brain stimulation as a way to enhance the effects of speech and language therapy, which may ultimately lead to better and faster recovery from stroke and aphasia. The investigators hypothesize that participants with aphasia who receive speech and language therapy paired with active electrical brain stimulation will improve significantly more on a language comprehension task than those who receive speech and language therapy paired with sham stimulation.