Background: Aphasia, a language impairment usually induced by stroke, is typically the result of damage to the left hemisphere. Severity of this disorder can vary across patients, as well as the degree of impairment at various levels of linguistic processes. However, one consistent symptom of aphasia is anomia (or dysnomia) which is a word finding deficit. Given the reliable presence of anomia, picture naming is a common task used both clinically and experimentally to probe linguistic processing.