Evaluating the Effectiveness of Semantic-Based Treatment for Naming Deficits in Aphasia: What Works?

Abstract

This article reviews the basic principles and evidence for the effectiveness of a semantic-based treatment for naming deficits in aphasia. This article focuses on three aspects of semantic-based treatment. First, the theoretical basis for semantic treatment approaches to alleviate naming deficits is explained. Second, the different types of semantic treatment approaches (i.e., substitutive and restitutive treatments) are reviewed. More attention is provided to restitutive treatment approaches, and some ideas regarding why these treatments may be effective are discussed. We argue that strengthening access to impaired semantic and phonologic representations and facilitating generalization to untrained but related targets are two factors determining the success of a restitutive-based semantic treatment. Finally, in the third section of the article, the effect of semantic treatment on the overall communicative effectiveness and suggestions for future research in this field are discussed.

The nature of facilitation and interference in the multilingual language system: insights from treatment in a case of trilingual aphasia

“…Another finding of this study was that a small subset of patients showed cross-language generalization only to semantically related translations, suggesting some form of inhibition that did not impact the untrained semantic associates in the untrained language. The observed instances of positive cross-language generalization were explained by the increased spreading activation of both target words and their semantically related neighbours in both the trained language and the untrained language and is consistent with what is known about generalization in monolingual aphasia (Kiran & Bassetto, 2008) and cross-language priming . Explanations for the instances in which no cross-language generalization was observed, or when generalization was only observed to semantically related neighbours of the translations of the trained items, were explained in the context of an interaction between spreading activation and inhibitory control.…”

“…Patients received a semantic-based naming treatment in one language (either English or Spanish), and cross-language generalization was examined to the untrained language (Kiran, Sandberg, Ascenso, Kester, & Gray, 2013). Most of the patients showed within-language generalization (i.e., generalization to semantically related items within the same language), a finding that is consistent with theories of monolingual aphasia rehabilitation (Kiran & Bassetto, 2008;Maher & Raymer, 2004). However, fewer than half of the patients showed cross-language generalization to translations or to semantically related translations.…”

A Review of Verb Network Strengthening Treatment

“…However, on the basis of reviews of single-word-naming treatments and verb-focused treatments, VNeST appears to exhibit relatively robust generalization to noun and verb naming, sentence production, and lexical retrieval within sentences in discourse, although more research is needed. See Conroy et al (2006) and Webster and Whitworth (2012) for verb treatment reviews, Boyle (2010) for a review of semantic feature analysis, and Druks (2002), Kiran and Bassetto (2008), and Nickels (2002) for reviews of single-word approaches to treatment.…”

Multimodal therapy of word retrieval disorder due to phonological encoding dysfunction

“…More precisely, semantic and phonological therapies are effective for central semantic deficits and phonological or mixed phonological and semantic treatments are effective for phonological encoding disorders [5,6,[12][13][14][15]. However, the relationship between the nature of impairment of word retrieval and its appropriate treatment is widely debated [10,16,17].…”