Influence of Stimulus- and Patient-Level Factors on Naming Treatment Outcomes in Individuals with Aphasia

EasyChair Preprint no. 6361

Abstract

This retrospective study examined whether treatment-related changes in binary naming accuracy were predicted by (1) stimulus-level psycholinguistic properties (Question 1) and (2) patient-level semantic and phonological processing skills (Question 2). Participants were 30 individuals with chronic post-stroke aphasia who completed a course of typicality-based semantic feature treatment for anomia. Participants completed assessment of overall aphasia severity, semantic processing skills, and phonological processing skills at baseline and post-treatment as well as a 180-item picture naming probe of trained and monitored (not trained) items at baseline, every two treatment sessions, and post-treatment. Psycholinguistic properties for each probe item were obtained and a principal component analysis (PCA) was completed with the probe stimuli reducing these highly correlated variables into lexical-semantic, phonological, and phonotactic domains to be input into mixed effects logistic regression models for Question 1. Baseline patient-level semantic and phonological processing scores served as model input for Question 2. At the stimulus level (Question 1), models showed that the predicted probability of a correct response for trained (but not monitored) items increased over time more for semantically difficult vs. easy items. At the individual level (Question 2), models showed that the predicted probability of a correct response increased more over time for individuals with stronger vs. weaker semantic skills and for individuals with stronger vs. weaker phonological skills. This work provides preliminary evidence that a.) lexical-semantic properties of stimuli influence treatment response and b.) semantic and phonological processing skills have predictive power for outcomes to semantically-based naming treatment.

Keyphrases: aphasia, Psycholinguistic, treatment, word retrieval

@Booklet{EasyChair:6361,
  author = {Emily Braun and Swathi Kiran},
  title = {Influence of Stimulus- and Patient-Level Factors on Naming Treatment Outcomes in Individuals with Aphasia},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 6361},

  year = {EasyChair, 2021}}