Examining the facilitative effects of rhyme in a patient with output lexicon damage

A theory-driven treatment was designed to facilitate access to the impaired output lexicons of a 47-year-old woman with aphasia resulting from a left parietal haemorrhage. In the context of a multiple-baseline design, lists o f rhymed word pairs from four semantic categories were trained using a syst ematic cueing hierarchy. Performance measures were based on the subject's g eneration of targeted words, verbally and in writing, when presented with a rhyme of the target. Results demonstrated positive acquisition, generaliza tion and maintenance effects for treated and untreated items across semanti c categories. Delayed generalization patterns may be explained by retrieval inhibition (Blaxton and Bookheimer 1993) or lateral inhibition (McClelland and Rumelhart 1981).