Anomia treatment with contextual priming: A case study

Factors influencing treatment-induced language recovery in chronic, post-stroke aphasia

“…Previous research indicates that lexical-semantic processing ability positively influences treatment response for anomia rehabilitation Martin & Gupta, 2004;Renvall et al, 2003;Renvall et al, 2005). Consistent with these findings, the present research found that lexical-semantic processing ability was a significant predictor of anomia therapy outcomes for treated items at post-therapy and 1 month follow-up for the LIFT and D-LIFT conditions.…”

“…There is evidence that individuals' language profiles, including aphasia severity and auditory comprehension/lexical-semantic comprehension, may influence the treatmentinduced recovery of aphasia Paolucci et al, 2005;Renvall et al, 2003;Renvall et al, 2005). The nature of the relationship between aphasia severity and treatment response remains uncertain, whilst previous research suggests that impaired auditory comprehension or (input) lexical-semantic processing may negatively affect treatment gains.…”

“…Martin and Gupta (2004) suggest that intact single-word, lexical-semantic comprehension is necessary in order to achieve anomia therapy gains for people with aphasia. Specifically, Martin and colleagues (Martin, Fink, & Laine, 2004;Renvall, Laine, Laakso, & Martin, 2003;Renvall, Laine, & Martin, 2005) have provided evidence for the role of lexical-semantic comprehension on naming therapy gains in response to a contextual repetition priming treatment. From these studies, Martin and Gupta (2004) suggest that individuals with impaired lexical-semantic comprehension may fail to achieve treatment-induced gains because of impaired spreading activation of semantic representations and/or no change in the strength of connections between lexical-semantic and phonological representations.…”

Treatment of anomia with contextual priming: Exploration of a modified procedure with additional semantic and phonological tasks

“…Simple picture-to-word matching tasks do not, however, facilitate naming significantly more than phonological tasks at least for a patient like LV who in addition to semantic problems did show phonological problems especially in repeating and reading aloud nonwords. In addition, the present study brings further evidence that patients with late phonological problems (like JP in this study and YK in Renvall et al, 2003) benefit from the CP treatment because of the repetition priming component while different contexts or additional semantic and phonological tasks all have similar facilitative effect on naming. The results are in line with Howard's (2000) conclusion that the itemspecific facilitation of naming may be due to strengthened mappings between the lexicalsemantic and lexical-phonological levels via massive practise.…”

“…Since then, one facilitation study (Martin et al, 2004b) and three treatment studies (Renvall et al, 2003;Martin et al, 2004a;Renvall et al, 2005) have been published. These studies suggest that the contextual priming procedure is most effective when semantic processing is relatively spared.…”