The Effect of Personalized Cueing on Long-Term Naming of Realistic Visual Stimuli

Associative learning techniques have been used successfully to teach word pair lists to subjects with brain damage. However, these techniques have not been used systematically to improve naming of complex visual stimuli such as might be found in aphasia therapy. This study examined the effect of an associative learning procedure, personalized cueing, on long-term naming of 40 realistic stimuli by 10 subjects with aphasia and 10 subjects without brain damage. The results showed that subjects without brain damage had significantly higher levels of naming accuracy than subjects with aphasia; however, subjects with aphasia were able to recall approximately 50% of the trained stimuli on both the 1-week and 30-day post-training probes. These results show that subjects with aphasia are able to use personalized cueing to learn effectively the names of items pictured in realistic visual stimuli and that the effects of training can be durable over time.

Key Words: aphasia, rehabilitation, speech-language treatment, associative learning

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