Shortened stimulus exposure time in confrontation naming in aphasia reveals temporal processing impairments: Implications for assessment and treatment of anomia

Response delays in language tasks yield variable results in people with aphasia (PWA): some improve, some worsen, and others have no significant change in accuracy relative to immediate response conditions. Current models cannot account for different performance patterns between delayed naming and repetition tasks within the same individual.One key way that naming differs from repetition is the duration of stimulus exposure. We investigated the contribution of stimulus duration to temporal processing variability in aphasia. 19 PWA completed tests of immediate and delayed naming and repetition. Pictures in short-exposure naming appeared for only 100 ms, whereas pictures in the long exposure condition appeared for3000 ms. While this manipulation did not eliminate diverging performance accuracy between delayed naming and repetition, shortening picture duration did increase task difficulty and revealed greater variability in temporal processing. We discuss the role of visual semantic activation in the time course of word retrieval.