ABSTRACT
Unlike auditory comprehension, there are many studies of therapy designed to improve word retrieval. Indeed, studies targeting word retrieval form the bulk of the therapeutic literature and address a range of issues at the centre of the cognitive neuropsychology approach. The majority of studies have focused on the semantic system, the phonological output lexicon (or access to it), or a combination of these processing components, either within the same or separate therapy tasks. Although several studies do stipulate that therapy has been directed at accessing the phonological output lexicon from semantics rather than the lexicon itself, these studies are presented together here. The papers presented here also include a small number of studies that have looked at short-term facilitation of naming performance rather than therapy per se (e.g. Howard, Patterson, Franklin, Orchard-Lisle, & Morton, 1985; Le Dorze, Boulay, Gaudreau, & Brassard, 1994). These studies have been included as they use tasks that have later been developed into therapy tasks. In addition, it has been suggested that a client’s response to facilitation tasks may predict their response to therapy (Hickin, Best, Herbert, Howard, & Osborne, 2002). The studies reviewed here are listed in Table 11.1.
