Aphasic naming in Spanish: predictors and errors

• Published in: Brain and language Vol. 82; no. 3; pp. 344 - 365
• Main Authors: Cuetos, Fernando, Aguado, Gerardo, Izura, Cristina, Ellis, Andrew W
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: San Diego, CA Elsevier Inc 01.09.2002; Elsevier
• Subjects: Adult; Adult and adolescent clinical studies; Age of acquisition; Aged; Anomia; Anomia - diagnosis; Aphasia; Aphasia - diagnosis; Biological and medical sciences; Familiarity; Female; Humans; Language; Language and communication disorders; Male; Medical sciences; Middle Aged; Naming; Organic mental disorders. Neuropsychology; Prospective Studies; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychopathology. Psychiatry; Semantics; Word frequency; Aphasia; Age of acquisition; Word frequency; Naming; Familiarity; Anomia; Human; Nervous system diseases; Stimulus familiarity; Cognition; Language disorder; Cerebral disorder; Central nervous system disease; Spanish; Neurological disorder
• ISSN: 0093-934X; 1090-2155
• DOI: 10.1016/S0093-934X(02)00038-X

Sixteen Spanish aphasic patients named drawings of objects on three occasions. Multiple regression analyses were carried out on the naming accuracy scores. For the patient group as a whole, naming was affected by visual complexity, object familiarity, age of acquisition, and word frequency. The combination of variables predicted naming accuracy in 15 of the 16 individual patients. Age of acquisition, word frequency, and object familiarity predicted performance in the greatest number of patients, while visual complexity, imageability, animacy, and length all affected performance in at least two patients. High proportions of semantic and phonological errors to particular objects were associated with objects having early learned names while high proportions of no-response errors were associated with low familiarity and low visual complexity. It is suggested that visual complexity and object familiarity affect the ease of object recognition while word frequency affects name retrieval. Age of acquisition may affect both stages, accounting for its influence in patients with a range of different patterns of disorder.