Despite agreement that dysnomia affects virtually every aphasic patient, there is no consensus about the purpose and effectiveness of techniques to treat it. Semantic feature analysis (SFA), a treatment technique designed to improve retrieval of conceptual information by accessing semantic networks, was used to treat aphasic dysnomia in a 57-year-old male who exhibited Broca's aphasia secondary to a left frontoparietal ischemic infarction. SFA was effective for improving confrontation naming and for generalized improvement to untreated pictures. However, no generalization to connected speech was seen on the measures of mean words per minute, mean correct information units per minute, or the percentage of all words that were correct information units.

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The effect of semantic feature analysis (SFA) treatment on confrontation naming and discourse production was examined in 2 persons, 1 with anomic aphasia and 1 with Wernicke's aphasia. Results indicated that confrontation naming of treated nouns improved and generalized to untreated nouns for both participants, who appeared to have different lexical access impairments. Both participants demonstrated improvement in some aspects of discourse production associated with the confrontation naming SFA treatment. However, there was no change in most manifestations of lexical retrieval difficulty during discourse for either participant. These findings support previous work regarding improved and generalized naming associated with SFA treatment and indicate a need to examine effects of improved confrontation naming on more natural speaking situations.

Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA) is a treatment technique designed to improve lexical retrieval by increasing the level of activation within a semantic network. The purpose of this study was to replicate the Boyle and Coelho (1995) study in which SFA was applied with a mild non-¯uent aphasic individual resulting in improved confrontation naming of trained and untrained items but no generalization to connected speech. The present study investigated whether a comparable treatment eåect could be demonstrated, and to what extent severity and type aphasia might impact overall outcome. SFA was applied to an individual with a moderate¯uent aphasia secondary to a closed head injury. Gains in confrontation naming of both trained and untrained stimulus pictures were noted as well as measures of connected speech. Potential explanations for these ®ndings are discussed.

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