Treatment Manual for Persons with Anomic Aphasia

Abstract

Anomia is synonymously described using several terms like naming impairments, word finding problems, word recall deficits, and word-retrieval difficulties. In one usage, the term is synonymous with naming disorder which means in a broader sense all aphasic patients are anomic. There have been investigations and assessments attempted to classify them into different types based on their homogeneity of features in the heterogeneous aphasia group. Hence, a treatment procedure which attempts to cater to these difficulties in different types of anomia is essential. Based on the available cognitive neuro psychologica/ models that recognize and explain the mechanism of naming in retrieval as well as production, management procedures were developed for the treatment of anomia. Four subjects with aphasia (all males) following a language-dominant hemisphere stroke with an age range of 47-72 years participated in the present study. The target stimuli and the test stimuli to be used during therapy sessions were developed with the help of two experienced Speech-Language Pathologists. The potential categories selected were nouns and verbs under the category of daily objects, fruits, colors and body parts. The treatment techniques that benefitted most subjects with aphasia were the cueing hierarchy technique and the semantic treatment technique. However, the efficacies of these techniques over the other techniques are required to be investigated on a larger population with anomia. Hence, the present study was only a preliminary investigation of the treatment techniques for anomia.