Neural activity associated with semantic versus phonological anomia treatments in aphasia

•Different treatment tasks for anomia may engage different neural mechanisms.•Activity in the left Caudate predicted treatment success using a semantic task.•Recruitment of the left SMG correlated with success using a phonological task.•These results may inform more targeted treatment of anomia for people with aphasia.

Naming impairments in aphasia are typically targeted using semantic and/or phonologically based tasks. However, it is not known whether these treatments have different neural mechanisms. Eight participants with aphasia received twelve treatment sessions using an alternating treatment design, with fMRI scans pre- and post-treatment. Half the sessions employed Phonological Components Analysis (PCA), and half the sessions employed Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA). Pre-treatment activity in the left caudate correlated with greater immediate treatment success for items treated with SFA, whereas recruitment of the left supramarginal gyrus and right precuneus post-treatment correlated with greater immediate treatment success for items treated with PCA. The results support previous studies that have found greater treatment outcome to be associated with activity in predominantly left hemisphere regions, and suggest that different mechanisms may be engaged dependent on the type of treatment employed.