Pictures are often used in studies on memory, perception, and language; normative data are thus needed for such visual stimuli. In the present study, we aimed to obtain normative data for a set of 272 black-and-white pictures from middle-aged and elderly Persian speakers. A total of 206 volunteers were divided into two groups: a middle-aged (40-59 years old) group and an elderly (60 years old and over) group. The groups had similar characteristics in terms of education. Norms for every picture were developed to provide measures of name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, age of acquisition, and visual complexity. The results revealed that all of these measures vary with age, except for conceptual familiarity.

Objectives: Anomia is one of the most common and persistent symptoms of aphasia. Although treatments of anomia usually focus on semantic and/or phonological levels, which both have been demonstrated to be effective, the relationship between the underlying functional deficit in naming and response to a particular treatment approach remains unclear. The aim of this study was to determine the relationship between the effects of specific treatments (Semantic feature Analysis and Phonological Components Analysis) and their underlying functional deficit patterns within the framework of a cognitive processing model. Methods:In an ABCB reversal control task design, four participants with aphasia were selected according to the criteria based on using a cognitive model of lexical processing. Each patient received two types of treatment. In SFA, features semantically associated to the target words were elicited from the patient, whereas in PCA treatment, the phonological components of the target words were the focus of treatment. Naming accuracy scores obtained in pretreatment baseline phase were compared to post-treatment accuracy scores. Here, both itemspecific effects and generalization of untrained items were analyzed.Results: Both SFA and PCA treatments have the potential to improve naming ability in participants; however, the treatment approach that corresponds exactly to the underlying deficit causing failure in word retrieval is more effective.Discussion: While PCA is more effective for participants with phonological impairments, SFA is more effective for participants with semantic impairments. Therefore, a direct relationship between underlying functional deficit and response to specific treatment was established for all participants.

Background: The purpose of the study was to analyze naming errors in patients with Alz­heimer’s disease in comparison to healthy subjects and determine the underlying cause of naming errors in these patients. Method: In this study, we included 35 healthy elderly subjects, 23 patients with mild Alzheimer’s disease, and 23 with moderate Alzheimer’s disease. Forty-five images were used to determine the type of naming errors, and to identify the underlying cause of errors, matching an image with a written word was used. Results: Patients with Alz­heimer’s disease had more naming errors compared with the group of healthy elderly, and patients with moderate Alzheimer’s disease showed a slower reaction in matching an image with a written word. Conclusion: Anomia in the initial phase of Alzheimer’s disease is due to problems in lexical retrieval; however, as the disease advances, in addition to lexical retrieval problems, conceptual knowledge causes naming problems.

No abstract