Brain mechanisms underlying phonological treatment effects in aphasia

A functional MRI-naming paradigm was employed to investigate the neural correlates of successful phonological treatment in an individual with impaired word-retrieval poststroke. Items to be treated were selected in a pretest. A subsequent pretreatment fMRI scan measured brain activity during unsuccessful naming of objects to be treated and during successful naming of a comparison set of items. A phonological naming treatment was delivered 2 to 3 times weekly over 3 weeks with posttreatment behavioural testing indicating 100% accuracy on treated items. A posttreatment fMRI scan indicated that compared to the pretreatment scan, successful naming of treated items was associated with significantly increased brain activity in a number of left and right hemisphere regions including the left inferior parietal cortex which has been associated with phonological processing in healthy individuals, suggesting a candidate neural mechanism for sound-based treatments of naming.1 page(s