Recovery of naming in aphasia: relationship to fluency, comprehension and CT findings.

We assessed oral naming skill after left hemisphere ischemic stroke in 54 right-handed aphasics. Initially, almost all had moderate to severe disability in oral naming. After 6 months, normal scores were achieved by one-third of the patients, all with lesions less than 60 cm3 in volume. Only 2 of 18 patients who were nonfluent at 6 months had normal naming then. Among patients with lesions less than 60 cm3 and persistently poor naming, there were two discrete lesion sites: posterior superior temporal-inferior parietal (semantic paraphasic errors) and insula-putamen (phonologic paraphasic errors). Individual variability was notable, with several patients regaining normal naming ability despite posterior temporal or insula-putamen lesions.