The relationship between word retrieval, drawing, and semantics in people with aphasia

Background: Word retrieval impairments in aphasia can affect a person’s ability to communicate his or her needs and ideas. Treatment for these deficits typically focuses on restorative and/or compensatory strategies. While traditionally used as a compensatory strategy, emerging evidence suggests that drawing may also have restorative effects on word retrieval by providing an alternate route to accessing the semantic system. However, the current understanding of this theoretical relationship between the semantic system, drawing, and word retrieval abilities is limited.Aims: The study purpose was to examine the relationship among naming, drawing, and semantic feature generation. Additionally, we examined the influence of drawing quality and content, as well as different performances based on aphasia severity.Methods & Procedures: Ten participants with chronic aphasia completed a series of sequenced tasks measuring confrontation naming accuracy before and after drawing and a semantic feature cueing task for target nouns.Outcomes & Results: Participants significantly increased confrontation naming accuracy when they named targets after completing semantic feature cueing then drawing. Additionally, there were moderate negative relationships between semantic content present in participant drawings and drawing quality with the amount of semantic features participants produced.Conclusions: Drawing, combined with a semantic cue task may result in more accurate naming as compared to confrontation naming alone; however, future research is needed to better understand this relationship.