The Interaction Between Word Frequency and Concreteness Effects in Anomic Aphasia

The core impairment of Anomic Aphasia lies in difficulty of retrieving words. Through a systematic review, this article analyzes the roles of two key variables, word frequency and concreteness, in the cognitive processing of patients. The study found that the word frequency effect mainly manifests as an advantage for high-frequency words, serving as a sensitive indicator of phonetic access difficulty. The concreteness effect is manifested as specific words outperforming abstract words, and its effect size is regulated by the completeness of the semantic system. The interaction between the two variables is significant; in particular, low-frequency abstract words pose the greatest retrieval challenge. This study further indicates that the word frequency effect and the concreteness effect respectively act on the early stage of word selection and the late stage of phonetic encoding. This review provides a theoretical basis for understanding the cognitive mechanism of Anomic Aphasia and offers guiding significance for clinical assessment and rehabilitation training.