Aphasia researchers at Boston University have published the results of a retrospective analysis of clinical records from persons with chronic aphasia, to probe influences of selected factors on subjects’ confrontation naming performance, and on patterns of naming improvements after therapeutic intervention. Broadly, the goals of the study were to characterize relationships – firstly – of inherent psycholinguistic properties of target stimulus words, and – secondly – of linguistic processing abilities in patients on word production before intervention and on patterns of improvement following intervention.
Participants comprised 35 PWA (25 male, 10 female) whose data had been previously collected for analysis regarding other questions. These subjects’ mean Aphasia Quotient was 63.5 (SD = 24.9), and all were premorbidly proficient in English. Both before and after intervention, they were assessed using the Western Aphasia Battery–Revised, the Boston Naming Test–Second Edition, a set of tasks aimed at assessing individuals’ phonological processing, and another set of tasks aimed at assessing their semantic processing. Intervention comprised 2-hour sessions administered 2-3 times per week, employing typicality-based semantic features treatment, which continued until 90% accuracy criterion was met or else 24 sessions were completed. The four specific questions investigated were: [1] Do stimulus-level psycholinguistic properties of nouns influence accuracy in confrontation naming? [2] Do they influence improvement for trained nouns, following typicality-based semantic features treatment? [3] Do deficits in patients’ semantic processing impair confrontation naming performance as well? [4] And do they influence responses to treatment for the trained nouns? Mixed-methods modeling and regression analyses were used to produce the following results.
During baseline confrontation naming, nouns with less complex lexical-semantic properties. that were also less complex phonologically, were produced with greater accuracy. Individuals whose phonological and semantic processing skills were less impaired at baseline were better at confrontation naming. The benefit of treatment on the postintervention confrontation naming of trained nouns was more pronounced in nouns characterized by lexical-semantic challenge than in nouns where phonological challenges predominate. These results suggest that future clinical work and research should consider both pscholinguistic properties of words and the semantic processing or patients.
For further reading: E.J. Braun & S. Kiran. 2022. Stimulus- and Person-Level Variables Influence Word Production and Response to Anomia Treatment for Individuals with Chronic Poststroke Aphasia. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 65(10): 3854–3872