Naming of two semantically impaired aphasic patients was treated with
the contextual repetition priming technique, which involves repeated
repetition of names of pictures that are related semantically,
phonologically, or are unrelated. Our previous studies using this
technique have suggested that patients with impaired access to
lexical-semantic representations benefit in the short-term from this
treatment technique, but show no long-term improvement in naming. In
contrast, patients with good access to semantics show short- and long-term
benefits from this treatment. Here we report two studies of treatment for
two individuals with aphasia affecting access to lexical semantics and
anomia but spared access to input and output phonology and spared
conceptual semantics. We predicted that they would show short-term
facilitation from the contextual priming, but no long-term improvements in
naming. The results confirmed the prediction. An account of this pattern
is offered within the framework of an interactive activation model of word
retrieval. Additionally, we discuss alternative techniques for addressing
naming deficits when access to semantics is impaired. (JINS,
2006, 12, 853–866.)