Abstract

Background: Anomia is a hallmark feature of aphasia present in all the variants of Aphasia. Many rehabilitation approaches like Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA) and Phonemic Component Analysis (PCA) are widely designed to remediate word retrieval errors in aphasia, yet their relative efficacy especially on untrained items is under-explored. Aim: To compare the generalization outcomes of SFA and PCA interventions in individuals with anomic aphasia, for untrained items Methods: Ten adults with chronic anomic aphasia secondary to single left hemisphere stroke were recruited. Participants were categorized into SFA and PCA groups (n=5 each), with therapy delivered for 20 sessions over four weeks for the respective groups. Generalisation was assessed using a confrontation-naming task with untrained stimuli. Results: The SFA group achieved a higher median accuracy scores on untrained items compared to the PCA group (58%). Statistical analysis confirmed the distinction between the two groups. SFA participants demonstrated broader improvements across semantic categories, while PCA group benefited mainly for phonologically related words. Conclusion: SFA promotes superior generalization compared to PCA for untrained items. Untrained item performance becomes a key to measure novice item generalization. 

Keywords

real life situation, novice, naming, therapeutic efficacy