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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
References
Carragher, M., Conroy, P., Sage, K., & Wilkinson, R. (2012). Can impairment-focused therapy change the everyday conversations of people with aphasia? A review of the literature and future directions. Aphasiology, 26, 895–916.
Goodglass, H., Kaplan, E., & Barresi, B. (2001). The assessment of aphasia and related disorders (3rd ed.). Philadelphia: Lippincott, Williams, & Wilkins.
Kaplan, E., Goodglass, H., & Weintraub, S. (2001). The Revised Boston Naming Test. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, Williams, & Wilkins.
Kertesz, A. (2007). The western aphasia battery-revised. San Antonio: PsychCorp.
Raymer, A. M. (2011). Naming and word-retrieval impairments. In L. L. LaPointe (Ed.), Aphasia and related neurogenic language disorders (pp. 95–110). New York: Thieme Medical Publishers.
Strauss, E., Sherman, E. M. S., & Spreen, O. (2006). Compendium of neuropsychological tests: Administration, norms, and commentary (3rd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tingley, S. J., Kyte, C. S., Johnson, C. J., & Beitchman, J. H. (2003). Single-word and conversational measures of word-finding proficiency. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 12, 359–368.
Tippett, D. C., & Hillis, A. E. (2015). The cognitive processes underlying naming. In A. E. Hillis (Ed.), The handbook of adult language disorders (pp. 141–150). New York: Psychology Press.
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Raymer, A. (2018). Word Finding. In: Kreutzer, J.S., DeLuca, J., Caplan, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57111-9_938
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57111-9_938
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Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
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