Objective: About 70% patients with stroke have dysfunction at various degrees in clinic, especially aphasia would affect their social communication tion and even offer a serious economic load for family and social. This paper aims to summarize the relevant articles on aphasia recovery so as to provide researching evidences in the future. Data sources: Relevant articles were retrieved from the Medline with the key words of "aphasia, recovery, language, recovery" in English from January 1980 to January 2004. Study selection: All articles were selected firstly, those which were related to aphasia recovery were selected, and the non-randomly clinical papers were excluded. The full text of rest was looked up to determine whether they were randomized controlled studies or not. Randomized controlled researches were regarded as inclusion criteria regardless of blind way. Data extraction: Among 22 articles on aphasia recovery, 12 were selected according to inclusion criteria and 10 were excluded because of duplicated papers. Data synthesis: Recovery of language function was related to sex, age, educational degrees, characteristics of lesion, range of lesion, duration from episode to language recovery, insight and self redress of language disorder. Therefore, there were various findings and views for previous researches on mechanism of aphasia recovery. Conclusion: There is not uniform conclusion on mechanism of aphasia recovery. Compliance of language function in brain may be a mechanism of aphasia recovery.