Contextual Cueing for Retrieval of Nouns and Verbs in Persons with Anomic Aphasia

Abstract

Persons with anomic aphasia exhibit word finding difficulties. These word finding difficulties are often attributed to lexical semantic breakdown and are manifested as naming difficulty. The errors on naming can be overcome by using cues. Cues can be of different types such as phonemic, semantic etc. Many studies have been carried out to determine the efficacy of such cues. Verbal contextual cue is also a type of cue where the context can serve as a cue; the efficacy of verbal contextual cue has not been studied much. The present study aims at determining the usefulness of verbal contextual cue for noun retrieval (measured through Boston Naming Test; BNT) and verb retrieval (measured through Action Naming Test; ANT) in persons with anomic aphasia. Participants in the age range of 45–55 years diagnosed to have anomic aphasia on Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) were considered for the study. BNT and ANT were administered on such participants. The findings of the study showed better utility of verbal contextual cues for naming verbs as compared to naming nouns indicating that the verbal contextual cue would likely release the blocks associated with naming verbs.