Measuring gains in connected speech following treatment for word retrieval: a study with two participants with primary progressive aphasia

Abstract

Background: The aim of lexical retrieval treatment for people with anomia is not just to improve accessibility of lexical items for confrontation naming but to carry over this improvement to communicative situations. However, there is no consensus on what measures are the most suitable to evaluate whether such changes have occurred. Anomia is one of the core presenting symptoms for people with primary progressive aphasia (PPA), yet while there is increasing evidence for the efficacy of word retrieval treatments in PPA, there is minimal information about how improvements in picture naming transfer to connected speech.