Cerebrovascular disease is a leading cause of disability and death worldwide, with about one third of stroke survivors initially suffering from communication disorders, including aphasia. Symptoms in aphasia vary from person to person, ranging from repeated failures in verbal expression to comprehension deficits that may occur in both the spoken and written modality. The current work synthesizes almost a decade of research on aphasia following left-hemispheric stroke in individuals with preserved right-hemispheric function: musical skills and formulaic expressions embedded in social interaction. Moving beyond the traditional scope of clinical linguistics, this work argues that preserved right-hemispheric function not only provides valuable resources in speech-language therapy, but also a possible foundation for psychotherapy in individuals with post-stroke aphasia and concomitant depression. An integrative summary introduces key developments in a line of research spanning from 2013 to 2021, to conclude with an outlook on forthcoming contributions and a commentary on the underlying conceptual framework. Each separate piece of research has been published previously in peer-reviewed journals. Here, the selected studies are assembled in an interdisciplinary context at the intersection of clinical neuroscience, speech-language pathology, and psychotherapy.

<div>Background: Structural priming – a tendency to reuse previously encountered sentence structures – has been shown to facilitate production of sentences in persons with aphasia (PWA). However, the task-specific and person-specific factors that modulate the strength of priming effects in PWA remain largely unknown. This study examined (a) if PWA and healthy older adults (HOA) demonstrate improved production of passive sentences following comprehension of passive (as opposed to active) prime sentences, (b) whether repeated use of a verb between a prime and target sentence boosts priming effects, and (c) whether individual participants’ deficits in syntactic processing modulate degrees of priming effects.</div><div><br></div><div>Method: The participants (16 HOA and 13 PWA) completed a comprehension-to-production structural priming task. For prime sentences, they completed a sentence-to-picture matching comprehension task. Then, they described a target action picture, which could be described in an active or passive sentence structure. For half of the prime-target pairs, the verb was repeated to compare the priming effects in the same vs. different verb prime conditions (i.e., lexical boost). To analyze individual variability, we examined if PWA’s scores on clinical measures of syntactic comprehension and production were associated with a positive priming effect.</div><div><br></div><div>Results: Both HOA and PWA showed increased production of passive sentences following comprehension of passive primes, although the priming effect was reduced for PWA. A significant lexical boost was found in HOA, but not for PWA. Within PWA, individuals with higher scores on clinical measures of syntactic production, but not syntactic comprehension, showed a significant priming effect.</div><div><br></div><div>Conclusion: The findings suggest that implicit comprehension-to-production structural priming is preserved in aphasia and that lexically-mediated structural priming may not be critical to effectiveness of structural priming in aphasia. Preliminary results indicate that individuals’ syntactic skills in the domain of production may need to be considered when comprehension-to-production priming is used to improve sentence production.</div>