We're a speech therapy software company making evidence-based treatment for adults with stroke, brain injury, and other conditions more accessible.
🧩 A different way to work on word-finding
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A lot of word-finding therapy leans on confrontation naming: show a picture and have your patient say what it is. But what about your higher-level aphasia patients? The ones who breeze through picture naming, but stall in real conversation, hunting for the word they know they know. Or your cognitive-communication patients, where the goal isn't really naming at all... it's reasoning, retrieval, and executive function all working together. A few things worth keeping in mind for these patients: 1️⃣ Word retrieval from a description, rather than a picture, draws more heavily on executive functioning (Miller et al., 2010). The patient has to hold the details in their mind, reason through them, and search for the right word – which is closer to what real conversation demands. 2️⃣ Abstract nouns and verbs make it harder. They're tougher to retrieve than the concrete nouns most naming tasks rely on. Verbs in particular tend to be harder than nouns, especially in non-fluent aphasia (Wahlstrand & Saldert, 2025). Including these words in your treatment immediately adds a challenge. 3️⃣ Training the hard words can pay off. Training abstract words, like justice, may support generalization to untrained words, like jury (Sandberg & Kiran, 2014). So choosing more complex words may be the most efficient way to make gains in therapy. This is what Naming to Description was built for. It's a new treatment in the Virtual Rehab Center, where you can deliver evidence-based therapy without the prep. In this treatment, word-finding becomes a puzzle to solve. 🧩 The patient reads and hears a description, sees the number of letters, and can work through built-in cues (as needed) to find the correct word. It's great for high-level aphasia and cognitive-communication deficits, and the letter count keeps patients searching for the exact word, not just a close synonym. The Virtual Rehab Center is free for 3 weeks, so you can use it in your next session at no cost. Give it a try and let me know how it goes!
Best, P.S. If you're looking for more high-level treatments in the Virtual Rehab Center, Working with Disruptions and Read & Remember Articles are two of my favorites. Be sure to check them out too. 💕 |
Tactus Therapy
We're a speech therapy software company making evidence-based treatment for adults with stroke, brain injury, and other conditions more accessible.
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