Testing predictions of the interactive activation model in recovery from aphasia after treatment

This paper presents preliminary results of pre- and post-treatment error analysis from an aphasic patient with anomia. The Interactive Activation (IA) model of word production (Dell, Schwartz, Martin, Saffran, & Gagnon, 1997) is utilized to make predictions about the anticipated changes on a picture naming task and to explain emerging patterns. Error patterns are viewed in light of two putative mechanisms within the IA network, connection strength, and rate of decay. The results suggest that while these mechanisms can successfully account for the magnitude and order of specific errors (e.g., predominance of semantic paraphasias and nonwords followed by formal paraphasias under the conditions of weak connections), the treatment may have influenced the occurrence/absence of some error types.