Anomia is the most frequent and pervasive symptom for people with aphasia (PWA) and can affect all grammatical categories. Research has long focused on name retrieval, while therapies targeting verb anomia remain scarce. Single word retrieval therapy for verbs is effective across different approaches. Nevertheless, the impact of sensorimotor strategies on aphasia recovery has been rarely explored. This study reports on the efficacy of Personalized Observation, Execution, and Mental Imagery therapy (POEM), a new therapy approach designed to integrate sensorimotor and language based strategies to treat verb anomia.

Two participants with chronic aphasia and verb anomia were followed-up in a pre-post therapy fMRI study. Tests of language and cognitive functions were completed. A personalized set of stimuli was built based on the naming performance on baseline controlled for linguistic variables. POEM therapy was administered in a massed stimulation schedule: three 60-minutes sessions per week for 5 weeks.

The results show a significant improvement in both participants, with trained and untrained items. Changes in fMRI patterns following POEM reflect a reduction in the number of recruited areas supporting recovered naming, and the recruitment of brain areas, part of language and mirror neuron systems.

This study originally contributes to the research on verb anomia treatment with an innovative structured combination of sensorimotor strategies allowing PWAs to retrieve more precisely and quickly treated and untreated verbs. Changes in fMRI patterns following POEM reflect a reduction in the number of recruited areas supporting recovered naming, and the recruitment of brain areas, part of language and mirror neuron systems. Future studies with a larger sample of participants are required to further explore this avenue.