How justice can affect jury: Training abstract words promotes generalisation to concrete words in patients with aphasia

Abstract

Developing language treatments that not only improve trained items but also promote generalisation to untrained items is a major focus in aphasia research. This study is a replication and extension of previous work which found that training abstract words in a particular context-category promotes generalisation to concrete words but not vice versa (Kiran, Sandberg, & Abbott, 2009). Twelve persons with aphasia (five female) with varying types and degrees of severity participated in a generative naming treatment based on the Complexity Account of Treatment Efficacy (CATE; Thompson, Shapiro, Kiran, & Sobecks, 2003). All participants were trained to generate abstract words in a particular context-category by analysing the semantic features of the target words. Two other context-categories were used as controls. Ten of the twelve participants improved on the trained abstract words in the trained context-category. Eight of the ten participants who responded to treatment also generalised to concrete words in the same context-category. These results suggest that this treatment is both efficacious and efficient. We discuss possible mechanisms of training and generalisation effects.

Keywords:

• Aphasia
• Treatment
• Generative naming

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Erratum

The authors would like to thank the participants for their dedication and hard work. We would also like to thank Missy Licata, Beryl Dennen, Elsa Ascenso, and Balaji Rangarathnam for their assistance with data collection. This work was supported by the National Institute On Deafness and Other Communication Disorders of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number F31DC011220.

Notes

¹Note that although the lower values of these ranges are below the small effect size cutoff according to Beeson and Robey (2006, 2008), the cutoffs are based on confrontation naming, not generative naming, and are therefore used here as loose guidelines.