This study incorporated Intensive Language Action Therapy (ILAT) targeting anomia across two linguistic classes, or parts of speech (POS): nouns and verbs. The participant was a person with aphasia (PWA) who sustained an acquired brain injury resulting in moderate expressive aphasia. The environment was a South Dakota city public access space. An Alternating Treatment Design (ATD) was used to compare ILAT treatment of nouns versus verbs over four weeks. Stimuli were chosen based on prior work from Alyahya. Nouns were chosen with the restriction that a verb in the list could not prime them. Verbs were chosen with semantic, phonological, and orthographic restrictions. The initial session included five rounds of naming each class. Stimuli included those which were achieved 40% or less correct naming across all five trial sets. Multiple statistical analyses were run to compare the results across dependent variable. As expected, nouns returned a steady, relatively shallow, increasing trajectory. Verbs demonstrated a much more volatile response in their increasing trajectory. This study demonstrated that the use of ILAT resulted in improving naming abilities across POS as both nouns and verbs resonded to the ILATprotocol. The Discussion section of this paper hypothesizes possible reasons why the null hypothesis of verb recovery increasing over nouns was rejected. The Discussion section also briefly explores that using verbs suggests future exploration in comparing transitive and intratransitive verbs and highlights an increase in mean length of utterance for all responses.
