A new set of tasks for the assessment of lexical disorders in Italian
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1
Casa di Cura del Policlinico, Department of Neurorehabilitation Sciences, Italy
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2
Centro Medico di Montescano, Fondazione Salvatore Maugeri, Italy
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3
ASST Rhodense, Rehabilitation Unit, Passirana Hospital, Italy
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4
Università di Milano-Bicocca, Department of Psychology, Italy
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5
Milan Centre for Neuroscience, Italy
Tasks used in the evaluation of language impairments are often overly complex and ineffective in the assessment of post-stroke patients affected by severe aphasia. These patients may obtain very low accuracy scores, which may not correspond to a complete deterioration of their lexical abilities. These considerations point out the necessity of a language test that may be able to assess severe as well as mild lexical impairments, to detect possible dissociations between different lexical tasks, as well as to measure small but significant variations in the patients’ performance over time and the effects of aphasia treatment.
The present study reports details on the construction and standardization of a new Italian battery of tasks for the assessment of severe lexical disorders in acquired aphasia. The battery is composed of a common set of 64 stimuli (concrete nouns), belonging to both living and non-living categories, and consists of four lexical tasks assessing picture naming, repetition, reading aloud and oral comprehension. The item selection was based on three variables: (i) high and low word frequency; (ii) word length; (iii) phonological-articulatory difficulty, namely presence of continuant vs. plosive phones, which, for severely impaired patients, may influence/facilitate word retrieval and articulation, especially after specific rehabilitation treatment (Luzzatti, 2012; Luzzatti, Colombo, Frustaci, & Vitolo, 2000).
Standardization (naming agreement) of a new set of 64 colored images and normative data on 110 Italian healthy subjects (55 females; mean age =54±20.5 years; mean education =12.9 ys±4.7 years), were collected for the confrontation naming task. Linear regression analyses showed a significant effect of age (p < 0.001) and education (p < 0.001), while no significant effect was found for gender (p = 0.21). According to the procedure described by Capitani & Laiacona (1988, 1997), results from the final multiple regression analysis proved both age and education, after transformation [log (100-age) and 1/educ], as best predictors of performance (F2,109 = 23.92, p < 0.001). Using the best-fit model, correction grids and equivalent scores were computed. For the oral comprehension task a cut-off score was calculated from a pool of healthy participants, while no errors were made in either the repetition or the reading aloud tasks. Finally, for the four tasks, we calculated standardized scores and percentiles from a pool of 85 patients affected by aphasia of different sub-types (see Table 1) and severity.
The battery allows a fine investigation of lexical disorders, being suitable for diagnostic assessment, detection of changes over time, and possible dissociations between comprehension, confrontation naming, repetition and reading tasks.
Table 1. Number of post-stroke patients included in the study, divided by aphasia sub-type.
References
Capitani, E., & Laiacona, M. (1988). Aging and psychometric diagnosis of intellectual impairment: Some considerations on test scores and their use. Developmental Neuropsychology, 4(4), 325–330. https://doi.org/10.1080/87565648809540416
Capitani, E., & Laiacona, M. (1997). Composite neuropsychological batteries and demographic correction: Standardization based on equivalent scores, with a review of Published Data. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 19(6), 795–809. https://doi.org/10.1080/01688639708403761
Luzzatti, C. (2012). La rieducazione dei deficit fonologici e dell’articolazione. In A. Mazzucchi (Ed.), La Riabilitazione Neuropsicologica: Premesse teoriche ed applicazioni cliniche. (3rd ed., pp. 25–47). Milano: Elsevier.
Luzzatti, C., Colombo, C., Frustaci, M., & Vitolo, F. (2000). Rehabilitation of spelling along the sub-word-level routine. Neuropsychological Rehabilitation, 10(3), 249–278. https://doi.org/10.1080/096020100389156
Keywords:
Naming impairment,
Comprehension deficits,
reading impairment,
repetition deficits,
Lexical Processing
Conference:
Academy of Aphasia 56th Annual Meeting, Montreal, Canada, 21 Oct - 23 Oct, 2018.
Presentation Type:
poster presentation
Topic:
not eligible for a student prize
Citation:
Veronelli
L,
Scola
I,
Frustaci
M,
Corbo
M and
Luzzatti
C
(2019). A new set of tasks for the assessment of lexical disorders in Italian.
Conference Abstract:
Academy of Aphasia 56th Annual Meeting.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2018.228.00014
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Received:
30 Apr 2018;
Published Online:
22 Jan 2019.
*
Correspondence:
PhD. Laura Veronelli, Casa di Cura del Policlinico, Department of Neurorehabilitation Sciences, Milan, Italy, l.veronelli@ccppdezza.it