Rights The author retains all proprietary rights, such as patent rightsand the right to use in future works. THE EFFECTIVENESS OF INITIAL SYLLABLE CUE FOR WORD- RETRIEVAL IN CANTONESE-SPEAKING APHASICS

.•£_/> 8.Sc£Q,<- tear fc) Studies conducted on English-speakers found that phonemic cueing is an effective therapeutic tech-nique in treating aphasic patients with word-retrieval problem. Cantonese is a syllabic lan-guage. So? intitial syllable CUB is applied in treatment for Cantonese-speaking aphakics instead "of phonemic cuem However,, no research has been done to evaluate its effectiveness. In this study, confron-tation naming task was used to investigate the effectiveness of initial syllable cue to the Canton-ese-speaking aphasics. Subjects were chosen to meet criteria based on previous studies which should make them responsive to phonemic cue. The initial sylla-ble cue was found to be effective for Cantonese-speaking aphasics to retrieve words in picture naming. Two types of initial syllable cues in Cantonese were tested s (1) semantical ly related t', the target compound word; (2) semantically unrelated to the target word- Results showed that the addi-tion of semantic element in the initial syllable in Cantonese would not increase the cueing effective