The Influence of Phonomotor Treatment on Word Retrieval: Insights From Naming Errors.

Purpose An increasing number of anomia treatment studies have coupled traditional word retrieval accuracy outcome measures with more fine-grained analysis of word retrieval errors to allow for more comprehensive measurement of treatment-induced changes in word retrieval. The aim of this study was to examine changes in picture naming errors after phonomotor treatment. Method Twenty-eight individuals with aphasia received 60 hr of phonomotor treatment, an intensive, phoneme-based therapy for anomia. Confrontation naming was assessed pretreatment, immediately posttreatment, and 3 months posttreatment for trained and untrained nouns. Responses were scored for accuracy and coded for error type, and error proportions of each error type (e.g., semantic, phonological, omission) were compared: pre- versus posttreatment and pretreatment versus 3 months posttreatment. Results The group of treatment participants improved in whole-word naming accuracy on trained items and maintained their improvement. Treatment effects also generalized to untrained nouns at the maintenance testing phase. Additionally, participants demonstrated a decrease in proportions of omission and description errors on trained items immediately posttreatment. Conclusions Along with generalized improved whole-word naming accuracy, results of the error analysis suggest that a global (i.e., both lexical-semantic and phonological) change in lexical knowledge underlies the observed changes in confrontation naming accuracy following phonomotor treatment.

Links Between Short-Term Memory and Word Retrieval in Aphasia.

Purpose: This study explored the relationship between anomia and verbal short-term memory (STM) in the context of an interactive activation language processing model. Method: Twenty-four individuals with aphasia and reduced STM spans (i.e., impaired immediate serial recall of words) completed a picture-naming task and a word pair repetition task (a measure of verbal STM). Correlations between verbal STM and word retrieval errors made on the picture-naming task were examined. Results: A significant positive correlation between naming accuracy and verbal span length was found. More intricate verbal STM analyses examined the relationship between picture-naming error types (i.e., semantic vs. phonological) and 2 measures of verbal STM: (a) location of errors on the word pair repetition task and (b) imageability and frequency effects on the word pair repetition task. Results indicated that, as phonological word retrieval errors (relative to semantic) increase, bias toward correct repetition of high-imageability words increases. Conclusions: Results suggest that word retrieval and verbal STM tasks likely rely on a partially shared temporary linguistic activation process.