Predictors of object naming in aphasia: does cognitive control mediate the effects of psycholinguistic variables?

Abstract

Background and Aims:Previous studies have shown that age of acquisition affects language production in persons with aphasia (PWA), specifically, earlier-acquired words are better preserved compared to later-learned ones (for review, see Brysbaert & Ellis, 2016). Also, it has been argued that naming objects with lower name agreement requires inhibition of alternative names (Alario et al., 2004), and therefore puts higher demands on cognitive control. Bose and Schafer (2017) showed that although both PWA and healthy controls performed better at naming words with high naming agreement, the difference between the naming conditions was significantly greater for PWA. This could be due to reduced ability to inhibit irrelevant information in PWA. The current study aims to investigate whether cognitive control mediates the effects of psycholinguistic variables on object naming accuracy in aphasia. Methods and Procedures: Participants (N = 31, 32% female) were right-handed, native Russian speakers with preserved visual and hearing abilities diagnosed with mild to moderate post-stroke aphasia. They were aged 40-70 (mean = 59.5, SD = 8.6). The participants were tested on a picture-naming task including 247 items and 2 subtests from the Russian Birmingham Cognitive Screen, namely Auditory attention, and Rule Finding tasks. Outcomes and Results: To define whether cognitive control mediates the effect of psycholinguistic variables on naming response accuracy, multiple linear regression was used. Significant main effects of log-transformed word frequency, AoA, and cognitive control were found, as well as a significant interaction between logtransformed word frequency and cognitive control. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that cognitive control mediated the effect of word frequency in naming in aphasia. PWA with weaker cognitive control name pictures depicting less-frequent words less accurately than more frequent words. This points to the fact that PWA have difficulty in lexical access when producing language. The implications of the study are that the focus of aphasia rehabilitation should be on very frequent structures and words as these are usually more preserved in PWA with weaker cognitive control.

Picture naming test through the prism of cognitive neuroscience and linguistics: adapting the test for cerebellar tumor survivors—or pouring new wine in old sacks?

“…Visual complexity and image agreement determine adequate recognition of the object, while the semantic level is determined by imageability, concept familiarity and age of acquisition, which is also involved in phonological processing; name agreement applies to all three levels. Once motor programming starts, effects of word length (syllable / phonemic) set in ( Heikkola et al, 2021 ). Several additional variables might influence lexical retrieval too: namely, phonological neighborhood density ( Arutiunian and Lopukhina, 2018 ), type of object (natural or artificial), body-object interaction (BOI) and manipulability ( Georgiou et al, 2022 )—the latter two fitting the paradigm of grounded cognition.…”

“…Action naming was also first applied in the early XX century as a means of revealing the link between children's first-person experience (i.e., knowledge of objects and actions denoted by written words) and reading achievement (Woody, 1938). By the 1920s, both physical object and picture naming entered most batteries of language and cognitive assessment (Kuhlmann, 1922;Head, 1926), and the 1930s saw the appearance of the first standardized tests (Weisenburg and McBride, 1935). Since then, PNT has remained integral to language research and clinical practice.…”

“…Neither, however, has affected the current state of affairs in the testing field, since most of the widely used PNTs (the BNT among them) feature their own picture sets, making inter-test comparison impossible (Bonin et al, 2003). With the arrival of virtual and augmented reality, 3D sets are becoming feasible (Peeters, 2018), potentially bringing back the practice of using tangible real-life objects as stimuli (e.g., Head, 1926).…”

“…When possible, speech abnormalities in different conditions were compared. The first steps toward a standardized examination protocol were made in the early XX century (Krol, 1933), followed by the publication and subsequent adoption of Henry Head's tests in diagnostic practice (Head, 1926). The Lurian approach, first formed in the 1940s (Luria, 1947), differs fundamentally in its premises from the Western view of language processing.…”

Picture naming test: Linguistic challenges of the method and ways to solve them

“…Так, у группы нормы более быстрое называние высокочастотных лексем соответствует различным ЭЭГ-паттернами (Fairs et al 2021). С частотностью связана и точность называния: так, у пациентов с афазией называние высокочастотных слов более эффективно, чем низкочастотных (Heikkola, Kuzmina & Jensen 2021). Однако большинство традиционных тестов на называние игнорирует частотность, поскольку устные нормы не были доступны.…”