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Establishing and evaluating the gradient of item naming difficulty in post-stroke aphasia and semantic dementia

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Peer-reviewed

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Article

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Authors

Lambon Ralph, Matthew  ORCID logo  https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5907-2488
Nørkær, Erling 
Halai, Ajay D 
Woolams, Anna 
Schumacher, Ralph 

Abstract

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.

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Keywords

Journal Title

Cortex

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0010-9452
1973-8102

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Publisher

Elsevier
Sponsorship
Medical Research Council (MR/R023883/1)
This research was supported by a grant from the Independent Research Fund Denmark (grant number DFF-1024-00139B) to Randi Starrfelt,