Generalisation to untreated items in anomia therapy: links to individuals’ language processing

The aim of therapy for word-retrieval problems with people with aphasia is for carry-over to everyday communication. This may be most likely if the therapy generalises to untreated words . However, Howard (2000) claims there is little convincing evidence for generalisation. He suggests that both ‘semantic’ and ‘phonological’ therapies work by strengthening the links (‘mapping’) between semantic and phonological representations. This paper investigates generalisation to untreated items in anomia therapy by combining data over two recent studies and from the literature