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Semantic Feature Treatment With Verbs Essay

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Semantic Feature Treatment with Verbs Although evidence was accumulating for the use of SFA for treating anomia, and more was understood about differential access to verbs and nouns, knowledge gaps remained in both theory and in clinical practice. Indeed, Conroy (2006) proposed that “there has been limited consideration as to whether the differences between nouns and verbs influence the choice and outcome of therapy for verb retrieval difficulties and therapy responsiveness,” implying that even if verbs and nouns are different, that may not mean they require different therapies and too little was known about the effectiveness of verb retrieval therapies. Thus, just as the evidence for noun-based therapies had accumulated, researchers …show more content…

The results showed a positive change for trained items. Despite some positive data points, no generalization to untrained actions could be confirmed. Expecting better results, the authors theorized that other underlying deficits beyond the participant’s semantic system, such as accessing the phonological forms without providing enough stimulation with the phonological form of the target action or practice in accessing the phonological form, may have limited potential improvements. However, one potential limitation in the method for determining generalization was that a list of only ten untrained items was shown every session, therefore making the naming improvements suspect to gains from exposure or perhaps embedding any naming errors since no correction was provided. The second measurement of improvement was similarly a list of only ten untrained items from the original set of items which the participant could not name, leaving the possibility that the participant may have had difficulty with those pictures, naming those or action words, or improving to a level high enough to be significantly different given the relatively small sample size. Still, a very positive result at the follow-up probes at two and six weeks indicated a sustained level of production for trained action words. Moreover, although normative data for test-retest reliability precludes determination of significance, raw scores

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