Multisensory cueing facilitates naming in aphasia.

Ten participants is a small sample, and all had chronic, moderate-to-severe non-fluent aphasia after left-hemispheric stroke, so the results may not apply to milder aphasia or other language disorders. All participants received the same virtual-reality intensive language therapy, so the study cannot separate the contribution of cueing from the game, peer interaction, feedback, reinforcement, points and supervision. The cueing benefit was seen only in early sessions and not late sessions, so the effect may be temporary or masked by practice. Interaction time included both the requester's word retrieval and articulation and the partner's comprehension and motor response, so it is not a pure naming measure. The current design did not allow analysis of naming accuracy changes depending on whether cues were present.

The supplied metadata lists non-U.S. government research support, but the article text does not provide a funding or conflict-of-interest declaration.

Do not conclude that silent videos or sounds alone improve aphasia naming. The cues were delivered inside a virtual-reality intensive language therapy with a peer-to-peer game, visual and auditory feedback, reinforcement, points and supervision, and the study did not show that either cue type caused the overall naming gain.