A comparison of the relative effects of phonologic and semantic cueing treatments

Background: Lexical retrieval problems are pervasive in aphasia and are often an important focus of treatment. Although many treatments have been demonstrated to positively impact lexical retrieval in aphasia, comparisons of such treatments have been relatively rare. Aims: The purpose of this investigation was to compare the relative effects of two lexical retrieval cueing treatments when administered concurrently with a participant with chronic anomic aphasia. The cueing treatments, phonological cueing treatment (PCT) and semantic cueing treatment (SCT) were designed to target the lexical phonologic and lexical semantic levels of processing, respectively. Methods & Procedures: The participant received both treatments concomitantly in the context of an alternating treatments design and multiple baseline design across behaviours. Separate lists of words were assigned to each treatment and additional word lists were designated for generalisation assessment. Following achievement of criterion levels of performance, each treatment was then applied to the additional lists in order to attempt to replicate treatment effects. Outcomes & Results: The participant showed a positive response to both treatments. However, he achieved higher levels of accuracy of naming for items treated with SCT. This effect was observed in both phases of treatment application. Conclusions: For this participant, SCT appeared to be the preferred treatment, at least in the context of concurrent administration of the treatments. This preferential response may be related to a pretreatment pattern of responding in which the participant routinely used descriptions and semantically related sentence cues to attempt to retrieve words.