Effect of auditory prestimulation on naming in aphasia

In five aphasic subjects, picture naming alone was compared with picture naming in the presence of four different auditory cues. Eighty words represented by pictures were associated with the following auditory cues: the first phoneme of the target word; an open-ended sentence designed to elicit the target word; three words, one of which was the target word; three words, all semantically related to the target word. Three conditions--the phonetic cue, the open-ended sentence, and the set of three words containing the target word--facilitated naming significantly. The condition making use of semantically related words resulted in a significant decrease in naming performance. Implications of these findings for theories of verbal recall, impairment of verbal recall in aphasia, and language therapy are discussed.