title: How justice can affect jury: training abstract words promotes generalisation to concrete words in patients with aphasia.
abstract: Developing language treatments that not only improve trained items but also promote generalisation to untrained items is a major focus in aphasia research. This study is a replication and extension of previous work which found that training abstract words in a particular context-category promotes generalisation to concrete words but not vice versa (Kiran, Sandberg, & Abbott, 2009 ). Twelve persons with aphasia (five female) with varying types and degrees of severity participated in a generative naming treatment based on the Complexity Account of Treatment Efficacy (CATE; Thompson, Shapiro, Kiran, & Sobecks, 2003 ). All participants were trained to generate abstract words in a particular context-category by analysing the semantic features of the target words. Two other context-categories were used as controls. Ten of the twelve participants improved on the trained abstract words in the trained context-category. Eight of the ten participants who responded to treatment also generalised to concrete words in the same context-category. These results suggest that this treatment is both efficacious and efficient. We discuss possible mechanisms of training and generalisation effects.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences , Boston University , Boston , MA , USA.
authors.forename: Chaleece
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Sandberg
authors.forename: Swathi
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kiran
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D001037:Aphasia / Q000628:therapy*; D005260:Female; D005793:Generalization, Psychological; D006801:Humans; D007808:Language Therapy / Q000379:methods*; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D012660:Semantics
keywords: Aphasia; Generative naming; Treatment