THE TREATMENT OF ANEMIA RESULTING FROM OUTPUT LEXICAL DAMAGE - ANALYSIS OF 2 CASES

This study describes a treatment project, carried out with two anemic subjects. RBO and GMA failed to name pictures correctly as a consequen ce of damage to phonological lexical forms; their ability to process w ord meaning was unimpaired. Words that were consistently comprehended correctly, but produced incorrectly by each subject, were identified. Some words were treated, whereas some served as the control set. A sig nificant improvement was observed in both subjects. As predicted by th e model of lexical-semantic processing used as the theoretical backgro und for the study, improvement was restricted to treated items and did not generalize to untreated words, not even to words that were semant ically related to those administered during treatment. Improvement was long-lasting, as shown by the fact that 17 months post-therapy GMA's performance on treated words was still significantly better than befor e treatment. These results are discussed in relation to the claim that cognitive models can be profitably used in the treatment of language disorders. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.