A minimal standardization setting for language mapping tests: an Italian example

Abstract

During awake surgery, picture-naming tests are administered to identify brain structures related to language function (language mapping), and to avoid iatrogenic damage. Before and after surgery, naming tests and other neuropsychological procedures aim at charting naming abilities, and at detecting which items the subject can respond to correctly. To achieve this goal, sufficiently large samples of normed and standardized stimuli must be available for preoperative and postoperative testing, and to prepare intraoperative tasks, the latter only including items named flawlessly preoperatively. To discuss design, norming and presentation of stimuli, and to describe the minimal standardization setting used to develop two sets of Italian stimuli, one for object naming and one for verb naming, respectively. The setting includes a naming study (to obtain picture-name agreement ratings), two on-line questionnaires (to acquire age-of-acquisition and imageability ratings for all test items), and the norming of other relevant language variables. The two sets of stimuli have >80 % picture-name agreement, high levels of internal consistency and reliability for imageability and age of acquisition ratings. They are normed for psycholinguistic variables known to affect lexical access and retrieval, and are validated in a clinical population. This framework can be used to increase the probability of reliably detecting language impairments before and after surgery, to prepare intraoperative tests based on sufficient knowledge of pre-surgical language abilities in each patient, and to decrease the probability of false positives during surgery. Examples of data usage are provided. Normative data can be found in the supplementary materials.

Can tDCS enhance item-specific effects and generalization after linguistically motivated aphasia therapy for verbs?

“…The items surviving this procedure had a mean agreement of 90.11% ( sd = 0.084%). In addition, these items were normed for a wide range of linguistic variables to create matched sets of verbs (Rofes et al, 2015 ).…”

The verb and noun test for peri-operative testing (VAN-POP): standardized language tests for navigated transcranial magnetic stimulation and direct electrical stimulation

“…Since the task requires many linguistics processes simultaneously, more error types can appear under stimulation for verbs than for nouns: grammatical errors of failed inflection of person, number, or tense can appear. Action naming in sentence context, therefore, is a straightforward tool and as easy to administer as object naming [14,33]. Moreover, by including grammatical factors, it allows testing the patient's language skills more thoroughly than an object naming task alone.…”

Direct electrical stimulation mapping of cognitive functions in the human brain

“…For instance, for motor mapping, disruptions in voluntary movement are outwardly observable by the clinical team, and thus the patient "merely" needs to stay on task (e.g., tapping fingers). Similarly, in the setting of mapping of speech production, patients are engaged in a task, such as picture naming, word reading, counting, or sentence production (inter alia-see Rofes, de Aguiar, & Miceli, 2015;Rofes, Spena, Miozzo, Fontanella, & Miceli, 2015;Rofes et al, 2018). When patients make errors (i.e., errors of commission, failure to respond) due to DES, the effect of DES is observed directly by the clinical team.…”