Synonyms

Confrontation naming; Naming; Word retrieval

Definition

Word finding is the ability of a speaker to think of and retrieve specific words to express an intended idea.

Current Knowledge

Word finding is a skill that takes place in conversational speech as the speaker composes a sentence with nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and other grammatical words. The process of word finding relies on activation of a complex series of lexical-semantic and phonological representations (Tippett and Hillis 2015). The ease with which words are retrieved during conversation is influenced by psycholinguistic factors such as age of acquisition, familiarity, frequency, and phonological complexity (Raymer 2011). During clinical testing, word finding is often tested in the course of verbal tasks requiring one-word responses, such as confrontation naming of pictures of objects or actions, providing words in a specific category (e.g., name animals, say words starting with the letter “s,” name the days of the week), or answering specific questions (e.g., Which animal barks?) (Goodglass et al. 2001). Word-finding difficulties are common in all forms of aphasia associated with various neurologic conditions affecting the left cerebral hemisphere (e.g., stroke, brain injury, Alzheimer’s disease). Clinically, word finding is typically tested with confrontation picture-naming measures such as the Boston Naming Test (Kaplan et al. 2001) or word fluency tasks requiring the retrieval of words in a given category, whether semantic (e.g., animals; see Western Aphasia Battery, Kertesz 2007) or phonemic/orthographic (e.g., words beginning with the letter F; see Controlled Oral Word Association Test, Straus et al. 2006). Clinical measures, however, may not provide a clear picture of word-finding abilities as they take place in the context of conversational discourse (Tingley et al. 2003; Carragher et al. 2012).

Cross-References