Usefulness of investigating error profiles in diagnosis of naming impairments

Abstract

Background: Word-retrieval difficulties are commonly experienced by people with aphasia (PwA) and also by typically ageing persons. Differentiation between true naming impairments and naming difficulties found in healthy persons may, therefore, be challenging. Aims: To investigate the extent to which the Maltese adaptation of the Boston Naming Test (BNT) can identify people with lexical retrieval difficulties and to differentiate them from people with unimpaired word finding. Methods & Procedures:Naming performance of a group of PwA was compared with the performance of a control group. Performance on the Maltese adaptation of the BNT was investigated in terms of scores, range of scores and error profiles of the two groups. Outcomes & Results: All PwA scored below the mean score of the controls, indicating that persons who scored above the mean score may be considered as unimpaired. However, a number of the controls obtained very low scores that overlapped with the scores obtained by the PwA. This indicated that scores alone cannot be used to differentiate between impaired and unimpaired people. Some types of errors were only produced by people with impaired naming, and did not appear at all in error profiles of unimpaired individuals. Conclusions & Implications:Mild-moderate anomic impairments may be missed if naming impairment is assessed and diagnosed using a cut-off score. In order to differentiate between people with impaired and unimpaired naming, it is necessary to look at error profiles, apart from the number of errors, as the presence of atypical errors may be an important indicator of naming impairments.

Naming errors and dysfunctional tissue metrics predict language recovery after acute left hemisphere stroke

“…These errors indicate some degree of successful semantic access, which may reflect a stronger lexical-semantic system and a higher likelihood of successful lexical access in general. The strong positive relationship between semantic error proportions and naming accuracy supports this interpretation and coheres with data suggesting individuals with mild anomia—and even healthy controls, when they make errors—predominantly produce semantic errors ( Grima and Franklin, 2017 ; Nicholas et al, 1989 ; Tallberg, 2005 ). However, this result does not reflect that semantic errors (or mixed errors) are severity-insensitive like some researchers (e.g., Dell et al, 1997 ; Schwartz and Brecher, 2000 ) previously proposed; given the relationship we found, it is unlikely that we would find similar semantic error totals among patients with mild, moderate and severe anomia.…”

Word finding and lexical–semantic disorders.

“…Some also consider omission errors as an important sign of aphasia, as they are more likely to occur than semantic errors for some semantic categories (Bormann et al, 2008). Other unique naming error types produced by individuals with stroke-induced aphasia that were not seen in healthy controls include phonologically related nonwords, morphological alterations, perseveration, conduit d'approche (a series of phonologic errors), neologisms, and circumlocutions (Grima & Franklin, 2016;Halai et al, 2018).…”

Naming as a window to word retrieval changes in healthy and pathological ageing: Methodological considerations

“…The classification of errors and the identification of sensitive or potential breakdown points are essential for the early detection of syndromes, their diagnosis and the consequent intervention planning. Grima and Franklin (2017) showed that the presence of atypical errors is key to distinguishing between mild anomic impairments in healthy ageing and those in people with aphasia, an unnoticeable difference in the quantitative test scores. Similarly, Silagi et al (2015) showed that variability in the pattern of errors could help distinguish between controls and mild and moderate AD patients.…”