The Multilingual Naming Test in Alzheimer's Disease: Clues to the Origin of Naming Impairments

Abstract

The current study explored the picture naming performance of patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). First, we evaluated the utility of the Multilingual Naming Test (MINT; Gollan et al., 2011), which was designed to assess naming skills in speakers of multiple languages, for detecting naming impairments in monolingual AD and amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI). If the MINT were sensitive to linguistic impairment in AD, using it in clinical practice might have advantages over using tests exclusively designed for English monolinguals. We found that the MINT can be used with both monolinguals and bilinguals: A 32-item subset of the MINT is best for distinguishing monolingual patients from controls, while the full MINT is best for assessing degree of bilingualism and language dominance in bilinguals. We then investigated the cognitive mechanisms underlying naming impairment in AD. To this end, we explored which MINT item characteristics best predicted performance differences between monolingual patients and controls. We found that contextual diversity and imageability, but not word frequency (nor words’ number of senses), contributed unique variance to explaining naming impairments in AD. These findings suggest a semantic component to the naming impairment in AD (modulated by names’ semantic richness and network size).

Which Language Declines More? Longitudinal versus Cross-sectional Decline of Picture Naming in Bilinguals with Alzheimer’s Disease

“…This might occur if decline begins with the most difficult – and therefore most weakly represented – words in the lexicon (Ivanova et al, 2013). Because bilinguals know more words in their dominant than in their non-dominant language, the most difficult and most weakly represented words for these bilinguals might belong to the dominant language and be unknown in the non-dominant language.…”

“…Monolinguals with AD are disproportionally impaired relative to controls when naming pictures with low-frequency, low-familiarity, low-imageability, and late-acquired names (Cuetos et al, 2005, 2008; Gaillard et al, 1998; Ivanova et al, 2013; Kemmerer and Tranel, 2000; Kremin et al, 2001; Thompson-Schill et al, 1999). Thus, words that are weakly represented may decline more quickly and at an earlier stage of disease progression than more robustly represented words.…”

Bilingual language intrusions and other speech errors in Alzheimer’s disease

“…With these restrictions we were able to select 19 cognitively healthy controls (5 male; 19 Hispanic) who did not differ significantly from our 12 patients (5 male; 10 Hispanic) in age, education, and several language proficiency variables (see Table 1). Objective proficiency was determined by picture naming ability on the Multilingual Naming Test (MINT; Gollan, Weissberger, Runnqvist, Montoya, & Cera, 2012; Ivanova, Salmon, & Gollan, 2013) which consists of 68 black-and-white line drawings, administered in order of increasing difficulty (e.g., item #1 is hand , and item # 68 is axle ). Participant demographics, performance on annual neuropsychological test battery measures (see Weissberger, Salmon, Bondi & Gollan; 2013), and self-reported language history questionnaire responses are summarized in Table 1 1 .…”

Results From the NACC Uniform Data Set Neuropsychological Battery Crosswalk Study

“…The Work Group was charged with providing recommendations for replacing proprietary tests in the UDS Neuropsychological Battery with similar non-proprietary tests. The Work Group recommended that four tests be replaced: the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) 3 , to be replaced by the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) 4 ; WMS-R Logical Memory IA-Immediate and IIA-Delayed Recall 5 , to be replaced by Craft Story 21 Recall – Immediate and Delayed; WMS-R Digit Span 5 , to be replaced by Number Span; and the Boston Naming Test 6 , to be replaced by the Multilingual Naming Test (MINT) 7 .…”