Self-cueing of word retrieval by a woman with aphasia: Why a letter board works

This study reports the case of an aphasic patient, S.D., who demonstrates a spontaneous ability to self-cue for items she is unable to name, by pointing to the initial letter of the target word. The effectiveness of S.D.'s cueing strategy is demonstrated and, by comparing it with other methods of cueing, it is shown that the written form of the initial letter is required for self-cueing. It is shown that S.D.'s self-cueing can be explained, in an information processing theory, by a lexically-mediated cascade of activation from input orthography to output phonology.