Being able to communicate is something most of us take for granted. Speaking, and finding the right words to express ourselves is a skill that we use everyday. But when a person has aphasia (acquired communication disorder) after a stroke these everyday communication skills become a source of profound frustration and anxiety both for the person with aphasia and their families. While some people do recover many don‘t The proposed research aims to understand why only some patients recover spoken language after stroke and for those who don‘t recover identify potential methods to help make treatment more effective. Much has to be learnt about how the brain connects speech and language and how the brain recovers after stroke. To illustrate the brain connections that are important for spoken language production I will use brain-imaging techniques with healthy populations and people with aphasia, some days, others years after their stroke. The benefit of understanding this brain connectivity is that it will allow researchers and clinicians to make specific testable predictions about how spoken language production and the organisation of the brain will be after aphasic stroke, and how we can try to rehabilitate it. The proposed research will test these predictions.