Drawing and gesturing in aphasia.

The aim of the present rewiew consists of surveying the role that non-verbal tasks based on gestures and free drawing can have on the assessment of defective representational activities and on the rehabilitation of aphasic patients. The relationships between verbal and non-verbal cognitive disorders of aphasic patients and the underlying mechanisms will be considered in the first part of this review, in which distinctions will be made between permanent loss and difficulty of access to the semantic representation and between the non-verbal conceptual disorders observed in Semantic Dementia and in semantic stroke patients. In the second part of the review I will pass to discuss the contribution of gesture or drawing based tasks to the rehabilitation of aphasic patients, taking separately into account the use of these tasks to compensate for a severe reduction of language abilities and their use to improve naming ability in individuals with aphasia. The theoretical and clinical differences between the use of gesture or drawing-based tasks for rehabilitation purposes will be taken into account in this part of the survey, whereas in its final section the relationships between right hemisphere and non-verbal representational activities will be shortly discussed