Naming facilitation therapy: investigating the facilitation effect for the treatment of 500 words

Background: Previous research has shown that Facilitation Therapy improves word retrieval in individuals with anomia (Nickels 2002b). Facilitation refers to the strengthening of neurological mappings between semantic and phonological lexicons when both are simultaneously active, resulting in enhanced word retrieval (Howard 2000). Jacoby (1983) indicates that repetition effects are due to the retrieval of context-specific information about the priming episode (a function of episodic memory) rather than changes in the accessibility of lexical knowledge. Objectives: 1) Investigate the efficacy of facilitation therapy for the treatment of 500 words for 5 clients with anomia over the course of 5 weeks. 2) Investigate the underlying mechanism of facilitation therapy through identification of primacy and recency effects, which would indicate recruitment of episodic memory. Methods: An item-specific design included 500 treatment items and 100 untreated items, and additional untreated items from the BNT and PALPA. The facilitation task used was whole-word repetition alongside a pictorially presented stimulus of the target word. Pre and post treatment results were compared for the group and individual participants. This study presents the group results and individual results for two participants: AB and POD. Results: Numbers in the n=500 treated set improved for the group but were not significant. POD and AB improved significantly on the n=500 treated set. POD’s untreated n=100 set remained stable. Unexpectedly, AB’s n=100 untreated set improved significantly. Primacy and recency effects were not evident in both POD and AB’s results, indicating that gains are not attributable to episodic memory recruitment. Conclusions: Small sample size and increased variation amongst participant’s abilities may have hindered attainment of significance for the group. POD’s gains are directly attributable to facilitation; AB’s generalization indicates that a facilitation effect was involved, however this alone cannot be directly attributed to her improvement. Contributing factors are discussed.