Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA) in the Treatment of Naming Deficits: Evidence from a Malay Speaker with Non-Fluent Aphasia

• ¹ Ministry of Health Malaysia, Cheras Rehabilitation Hospital, Malaysia
• ² National University of Malaysia, Speech Sciences Program, Malaysia

Introduction Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA) is a treatment for lexical retrieval impairment in which participants are cued by providing semantic information regarding concepts they have difficulty with in naming tasks in an effort to facilitate accurate lexical retrieval (Boyle & Coelho, 1995). People with aphasia are commonly found to have naming deficits and speech-language therapists (SLTs) face difficulties in providing an effective treatment method to treat this deficit. This study aims to examine the use of SFA to address naming deficits for nouns and verbs in a Malay patient (KM) with non-fluent aphasia. Methods The following tests were administered to the subject pre- and post- treatment: 1) Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE); 2) Malay Object and Action Test (MOAT); and 3) A series of comprehension and production assessments in Malay. Subject was asked to name 101 and 50 pictures from MOAT. The stimuli were coloured photograph pictures. Treatment and probe (untrained) stimuli were selected from pictures that a subject could not name, yielding 40 nouns and 30 verbs. From these, 20 stimuli were randomly chosen as probe items and 20 as treatment stimuli (nouns), 15 treatment and 15 probes (verbs). For the treatment study, single subject A-B-A design was implemented. Three baseline sessions were completed prior to treatment initiation naming for both probe and treatment pictures. Subject attended once-weekly therapy sessions over 8 months. Probes assessing generalizations to untrained pictures were presented at 4th, 8th, and 12th and so on until the end of the programme. Results Results showed that KM’s ability to name trained and untrained picture stimuli improved for both nouns and verbs. KM demonstrated steady improvement in the SFA treatment of trained nouns and verbs: from 5% baseline accuracy to over 90% accuracy at treatment end for nouns and from 0% baseline accuracy to 90% accuracy at treatment end for verbs. Generalizations to untrained nouns and verbs also showed similar results. KM exhibited marked progress - from naming four nouns (20%) and two verbs (13%) in first probe to 17 nouns (85%) and 13 verbs (87%) in final probe. Pre- and post-assessments results revealed that KM performed better in most of the tasks measured. Conclusion Findings from this study replicate outcomes of previous studies using SFA with people with aphasia. SFA is proven to have helped individuals with naming deficits in accessing semantic features of a target word in a structured and systematic way. Training using the same set/number of pictures in the treatment helps a patient’s ability to retrieve untrained words. This procedure could assist practicing SLTs in Malaysia in treating naming deficits among Malay speakers with aphasia, hence increasing their verbal communication.