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Typicality Treatment for Naming Deficits in Aphasia: Why Does It Work?

Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Texas at Austin

Purpose: The present paper provides a review of a recent treatment approach for alleviating naming deficits in patients with aphasia. This is an example of a treatment that is theoretically based and supported by behavioral evidence from normal adult language processing.

Method: First, a theoretical basis for naming deficits in patients with aphasia is provided. Then, current options for semantic-based treatment of naming deficits are reviewed. Previous work from our laboratory indicates that training atypical examples of semantic categories resulted in generalization to untrained typical examples, whereas training typical examples did not result in generalization to untrained atypical examples.

The usefulness of the typicality treatment approach is discussed in the context of recent studies from our laboratory that have examined this approach across a variety of semantic categories, including animate categories (e.g., birds), inanimate categories (e.g., furniture), well-defined categories such as "shapes," and goal derived categories such as "things to have in a garage sale."

Conclusions: We suggest that the success of the treatment seemingly relies on the stringent selection of typical/atypical examples and on highlighting the variation of semantic features of the trained category as part of the treatment protocol.