GENERALIZATION OF NAMING AFTER PICTURE WORD MATCHING TASKS - ONLY ITEMS APPEARING IN THERAPY BENEFIT

The ability of dysphasic subjects to name pictures has been shown to b enefit from carrying out simple semantic discrimination tasks. Previou s experiments have failed to find generalization of this improvement t o related items even when these are used as distractors in the tasks. To improve the possibility of such generalization an experiment was ca rried out in which sets of items were drawn from a single functionally related category. Improvement was found for items directly targeted i n the therapy task and for items which appeared as distractors. The fo rmer improved significantly more than the latter. Related items which did not appear in the therapy did not improve. Thus generalization is limited to items which appear during the therapy task.