This paper presents a study of talk-in-interaction using data from a clinical setting involving interlocutors participating in a naming task. The participants are a man with fluent aphasia who has word-finding difficulties and his clinician. The study deals with the ways in which the participants demonstrate to each other how difficulties in performing the naming task are either ‘cognitively’ based or due to difficulties in speech production. They do so by way of what is known in this particular activity as prompting – semantic and phonological, self- and other-prompting – as well as candidate answers and evaluative accounts in which the participants talk about difficulties in terms of ‘recognizing’, ‘remembering’ and ‘knowing’ words and other cognitive processes.