Examining the facilitative effects of rhyme in a patient with output lexicon damage

Abstract

A theory-driven treatment was designed to facilitate access to the impaired output lexicons of a 47-year-old woman with aphasia resulting from a left parietal haemorrhage. In the context of a multiple-baseline design, lists of rhymed word pairs from four semantic categories were trained using a systematic cueing hierarchy. Performance measures were based on the subject's generation of targeted words, verbally and in writing, when presented with a rhyme of the target. Results demonstrated positive acquisition, generalization and maintenance effects for treated and untreated items across semantic categories. Delayed generalization patterns may be explained by retrieval inhibition (Blaxton and Bookheimer 1993) or lateral inhibition (McClelland and Rumelhart 1981).