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Establishing and evaluating the gradient of item naming difficulty in post-stroke aphasia and semantic dementia
Poster Session C, Friday, October 25, 4:30 - 6:00 pm, Great Hall 3 and 4
Rahel Schumacher1,2, Erling Nørkær3, Ajay D. Halai2, Anna Woollams4, Matthew A. Lambon Ralph2; 1Neurocenter, Luzerner Kantonsspital, Lucerne, Switzerland, 2MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 3Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark, 4Division of Neuroscience and Experimental Psychology, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom
Anomia is a common consequence following brain damage and a central symptom in semantic dementia (SD) and post-stroke aphasia (PSA), for instance. Picture naming tests are often used in clinical assessments and experience suggests that items vary systematically in their difficulty. Despite clinical intuitions and theoretical accounts, however, the existence and determinants of such a naming difficulty gradient remain to be empirically established and evaluated. Seizing the unique opportunity of two large-scale datasets of semantic dementia and post-stroke aphasia patients assessed with the same picture naming test, we applied an Item Response Theory (IRT) approach and we (a) established that an item naming difficulty gradient exists, which (b) partly differs between patient groups, and is (c) related in part to a limited number of psycholinguistic properties - frequency and familiarity for SD, frequency and word length for PSA. Our findings offer exciting future avenues for new, adaptive, time-efficient, and patient-tailored approaches to naming assessment and therapy.
Topic Areas: Language Production, Disorders: Acquired