Title: Phonological Neighborhood Density Effects on Treatment of Naming in Aphasia

Anomia, a difficulty in word retrieval, is one of the most prevalent disturbances in aphasic speech production. Heterogeneity in naming impairments poses a challenge to developing treatment programs for word retrieval difficulties in aphasia. Recent cognitive descriptions of word-finding impairments have been based on a two-step model of word production (Dell, Schwartz, Martin, Saffran, & Gagnon, 1997). Disruptions in accessing one level may result in predominately word substitution or semantic errors, while difficulty with a different level may result in phonological errors, for example responses with only partial phonology and/or incorrect phoneme substitutions. Therefore, considering the error types when planning treatment programs for anomia, may prove to be efficacious by allowing clinicians to target therapy to a specific underlying deficit.