THE CONTRASTING EFFECTS OF A SEMANTIC VERSUS A FORMAL SEMANTIC TECHNIQUE FOR THE FACILITATION OF NAMING IN A CASE OF ANOMIA

Facilitation techniques deemed 'semantic' in nature appear to be super ior to other techniques in the remediation of anomia (Howard et al. 19 85a). In such techniques, however, information about the spoken or wri tten form of the picture name is provided, i.e. the word is presented either in writing or auditorily, and is embedded in a task requiring s emantic treatment of the stimulus. The objective of this study is to d etermine the relative contribution of information about the spoken or written form of the picture name to the facilitative effect of semanti c techniques. A single-subject study of a patient with moderately seve re mixed aphasia and anomia was undertaken. The patient had received r egular therapy and 10 months had elapsed since the cerebrovascular acc ident (CVA) at the beginning of the experiment. An alternating treatme nt design compared the effects on naming of a formal-semantic facilita tion technique (including the spoken or written word form in a semanti c comprehension task) to a purely semantic facilitation technique (a s emantic comprehension task without the word form). The results indicat ed that naming improved significantly for the items treated with the f ormal-semantic technique, while there was no change in naming for the items treated with the purely semantic technique. These results may si gnify that the inclusion of word forms in the semantic task is a criti cal element of the facilitation technique. The formal-semantic techniq ue is interpreted to activate both word forms and word semantics; it i s thus hypothesized to provide information which facilitates naming. S ome positive changes were also observed in a picture description task, which is suggestive of upredicted generalization.