Rehabilitation of Spoken Word Production in Aphasia: A Special Issue of Aphasiology

Description

This volume focuses on the remediation of impairments of word production in aphasia. It is restricted to studies focusing on single word production and comprises papers by some of the researchers most active in this field worldwide. The scope of the papers is broad and includes many relatively under-researched areas and techniques. All the papers have in common a methodological rigour and the use of a single case or case-series approach. A range of treatment tasks are evaluated: "phonological" tasks such as phonological cueing and word repetition (for example Fink, Bechecher, Schwartz and Robey, Hickin, Herbert, Best and Howard, and Raymer and Ellsworth) and judgements regarding the phonological form (Franklin, Buerk and Howard); "orthographic" tasks such as orthographic cueing, word reading and writing to dictation (Fink et al; Hickin et al; Nickels); "semantic" tasks such as semantic cueing (Raymer and Ellsworth); the use of gesture (Rose and Douglas); computer presentation of tasks (Fink et al); and even just repeated attempts at naming (Nickels). In addition, the individuals treated using these techniques varied in the nature of their impairments and/or level of impairment that was targeted. The majority aimed to improve word retrieval generally, but one treatment was aimed specifically at verb retrieval (Raymer and Ellsworth), and another at improving accuracy of word production for an individual with a phonological encoding impairment (Franklin et al).