A facilitation consisting in the semantic category of a word. A facilitation consisting in the semantic category of a word provided by the therapist to the patient to prompt the retrieval of a word.
It is likely that aphasic patients retrieve semantic information with greater ease in nouns as compared to verbs. Thus, a semantic cue is more useful in the verb- naming situations in which the patient lacks the necessary semantic components. During noun naming, the semantic cue is likely to be redundant. Most of the patients derived greater benefit from phonemic cuing which is likely to operate at a later stage of processing—the articulatory level. In the case of anomic aphasic patients, the particular nature of their semantic deficit renders the semantic cue potent in both naming situations; but more so during verb naming.