Background: The Boston Naming Test (BNT) is widely used as a clinical assessment of language and cognitive deficits. It has been adapted and translated for use in other languages and cultures. Aims: This study translated and adapted the test for use in Greece. Normative data were collected on the test for healthy Greek speakers of different ages and educational backgrounds. Methods and Procedures: Participants in four different age ranges and with three levels of educational achievement were tested. They were screened for cognitive decline using a Greek version of the mini mental state examination. Outcomes and Results: Strong effects of age and education were found on naming. The former replicates previous results. Results on the latter have been less consistent and their occurrence here reflects the greater inequality in educational opportunity that has existed in Greece until comparatively recent times. Significant interactions between age, education, and gender are interpreted as reflecting changing social and gender roles in Greek society. A reordering of items reflecting their difficulty for this Greek sample is presented for clinical use. Conclusions: This study provides norms for a Greek version of the BNT. These highlight the effects of age and education on naming. Scores for many older and less‐educated participants might be taken to indicate pathology despite their lack of neurological or cognitive problems. This illustrates the need for norms that reflect local circumstances and the need to update norms as social and educational changes occur.

Discourse (a unit of language longer than a single sentence) is fundamental to everyday communication. People with aphasia (a language impairment occurring most frequently after stroke, or other brain damage) have communication difficulties which lead to less complete, less coherent, and less complex discourse. Although there are multiple reviews of discourse assessment and an emerging evidence base for discourse intervention, there is no unified theoretical framework to underpin this research. Instead, disparate theories are recruited to explain different aspects of discourse impairment, or symptoms are reported without a hypothesis about the cause. What is needed is a theoretical framework that would clarify the specific linguistic skills that create completeness, coherence, and complexity (i.e., richness) in discourse, and illuminate both the processes involved in discourse production and the reasons for breakdown. This paper reports a review and synthesis of the theoretical literature relevant to spoken discourse in aphasia discourse, and we propose a novel theoretical framework which unites these disparate sources. This framework is currently being tested as the foundation for Linguistic Underpinnings of Narrative in Aphasia (LUNA) treatment research. In this paper, we outline the novel framework and exemplify how it might be used to guide clinical practice and research. Future collaborative research is needed to develop this framework into a processing model for spoken discourse.

Background: Conveying instructions is an everyday use of language, and gestures are likely to be a key feature of this. Although co-speech iconic gestures are tightly integrated with language, and people with aphasia (PWA) produce procedural discourses impaired at a linguistic level, no previous studies have investigated how PWA use co-speech iconic gestures in these contexts. Aims: This study investigated how PWA communicated meaning using gesture and language in procedural discourses, compared with neurologically healthy people (NHP). We aimed to identify the relative relationship of gesture and speech, in the context of impaired language, both overall and in individual events. Methods & Procedures: Twenty-nine PWA and 29 NHP produced two procedural discourses. The structure and semantic content of language of the whole discourses were analysed through predicate argument structure and spatial motor terms, and gestures were analysed for frequency and semantic form. Gesture and language were analysed in two key events, to determine the relative information presented in each modality. Outcomes & Results: PWA and NHP used similar frequencies and forms of gestures, although PWA used syntactically simpler language and fewer spatial words. This meant, overall, relatively more information was present in PWA gesture. This finding was also reflected in the key events, where PWA used gestures conveying rich semantic information alongside semantically impoverished language more often than NHP. Conclusions: PWA gestures, containing semantic information omitted from the concurrent speech, may help listeners with meaning when language is impaired. This finding indicates gesture should be included in clinical assessments of meaning-making.

Improved discourse production is a priority for all key stakeholders in aphasia rehabilitation. A Cochrane review of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) for aphasia found speech and language therap...