The facilitation of picture naming in aphasia

Abstract

A series of four experiments are described investigating the effects of a number of treatments on the ability of aphasic patients to retrieve picture names, at some time after the treatment is applied. Auditory word-to-picture matching, visual word-to-picture matching and semantic judgements are found to have effects lasting for up to 24 hours. It is argued that durable facilitation of aphasic word retrieval is a consequence of treatment techniques that require the patients to access the semantic representation corresponding to the picture name, and this is contrasted with the short-term effects of techniques that provide patients with information about the phonological shape of the name. The theoretical and therapeutic implications of these results are discussed.