Cognitive rehabilitation of naming deficits following viral meningo-encephalitis

This case study describes the neuropsychological assessment and cognitive rehabilitation of a patient who developed word retrieval deficits for objects and people's names, following an episode of viral meningo-encephalitits. It shows the implementation and outcome of two techniques adapted to the patient's individual characteristics and context providing a more ecologically valid approach. In the first technique, "verbal semantic association", the patient was required to describe what she knew about an object as a strategy to help her retrieve its name. In the second one, "face-name association" she was taught to apply a visual-imagery technique in order to retrieve relevant people's names. Following the implementation of these procedures there was a decrease in the number of episodes of failure to retrieve objects and people's names in her everyday life context. The improvement found in the patient's ability to retrieve words is discussed in terms of the utility of cognitive rehabilitation programmes and cognitive models of language processing