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

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, and judgements regarding the phonological form; 'orthographic' tasks such as orthographic cueing, word reading and writing to dictation; 'semantic' tasks such as semantic cueing; the use of gesture; computer presentation of tasks and even just repeated attempts at naming. 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, and another at improving accuracy of word production for an individual with a phonological encoding impairment. Each paper relates the outcome of treatment to theoretical accounts of impairment, and one explicitly uses the results of therapy to inform these theories. Taken together these papers provide a snapshot of the 'state of the art' in the rehabilitation of word production in aphasia.