Treatment of Phonological Anomia in Aphasia: Some Suggestions for Users of Signed Language

Aphasiologists agree that with damage to the left hemisphere of the brain, both those who use vocal and those who use signed forms of communication are in jeopardy of developing aphasia, an impaired ability to produce and/or perceive language. Of the many symptoms that are associated with aphasia, anomia (a word retrieval impairment of language) is the most common, but while treatments for phonological anomia (a type of anomia caused by defective phonological processes) are available for users of spoken language, the same cannot be said for users of signed language. This paper aims to fill that gap in the literature by making some suggestions for the treatment of phonological anomia in signed language users. In spoken languages, phonological word finding deficits can be remediated by phonemic cueing tasks in which the initial phonemes of target words are provided as cues to phonologically prime targets and facilitate their retrieval. In this paper I argue that by simply substituting phonemes as cues for cheremes (the signed language equivalent of phonemes), we could adapt the phonemic cueing approach to treatment of phonological anomia in spoken languages to make it suitable for use with signed language users.