The association between nonverbal fluency and anomia treatment outcomes in people with post-stroke aphasia

Many people with aphasia experience concomitant executive functioning deficits, and the literature supports a role of executive functioning in treatment response. However, the optimal executive functioning assessment for measuring this impact is unclear, as is the extent to which outcomes (e.g., acquisition, generalization) may be impacted differently. The present retrospective study aimed to determine the degree to which nonverbal fluency, one measure of executive functioning with minimal language demand, was associated with naming treatment acquisition, stimulus generalization, and response generalization in people with chronic aphasia. We hypothesized that nonverbal fluency would be positively associated with treatment acquisition and both forms of generalization, based on the existing literature.

This retrospective study included 13 participants with chronic, post-stroke aphasia from a completed clinical trial. Participants completed 2 weeks of a cued picture-naming treatment. Using linear regression, we examined the association between baseline nonverbal fluency and Tau-U treatment effect size for trained (acquisition) and untrained items (response generalization) and percent stimulus generalization (definition naming).

Controlling for aphasia severity, nonverbal fluency was a small but significant correlate of response and stimulus generalization, but not of treatment acquisition.

Nonverbal fluency may be associated with generalization, whereby executive functioning abilities may support generalizing aphasia interventions beyond trained items and contexts. However, more research is needed to investigate the potential association between executive functioning and various treatment outcomes as well as its clinical utility.