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摘要: One third of stroke survivors experience deficits in word retrieval as a core characteristic of their aphasia, which is frustrating, socially-limiting and disabling for their professional and everyday lives. The, as yet undiscovered,“holy grail” of clinical practice is to establish a treatment that not only improves item naming but also generalizes to patients’ connected speech. Speech production in healthy participants is a remarkable feat of cognitive processing being both rapid (at least 120 words per minute) and accurate (~ one error per 1000 words). Accordingly, we tested the hypothesis that word-finding treatment will only be successful and generalize to connected speech if word retrieval is both accurate and quick.This study compared a novel combined speed-and accuracy-focused intervention-‘repeated, increasingly-speeded production’-to standard accuracy-focused treatment. Both treatments were evaluated for naming, connected speech outcomes, and related to participants’ neuropsychological and lesion profiles. Twenty participants with post-stroke chronic aphasia of varying severity and subtype took part in 12 computer-based treatment sessions over 6 weeks. Four carefully-matched word-sets were randomly allocated either to the speed-and accuracy-focused treatment, standard accuracy-only treatment, or untreated (two control sets). In the standard treatment, sound-based naming cues facilitated naming accuracy. The speedand accuracy-focused treatment encouraged naming to become gradually quicker, aiming towards the naming time of age-matched controls.