Clinical Application of the Slovenian Naming Test: a Pilot Study in Aphasia

EasyChair Preprint 6508

Abstract

One of the most common symptoms of various types of aphasia is the inability to name things (Kirshner et al. 1984). Therefore, a naming test, such as the Boston Naming Test (BNT; Goodglass et al., 1966), is often used as part of instruments to assess language ability (see Rohde et al. 2018). Given (i) the language-specific effects of priming in lexical access, (ii) the effects of age of acquisition and lexeme frequency, and finally (iii) the effects of lexeme length, phonological and morphological structure, existing naming tests cannot be directly translated from language to language (see Chan et al., 2014) but need to be adapted.  We developed a Slovenian naming test (STIB; Vogrinčič et al., 2021) with 60 full-colour illustrated items that were balanced according to the selected characteristics of the lexeme the were supposed to elicit, namely: the number of phonemes, ratio between vowels and consonants, average age of acquisition, and frequency within the corpus of spoken Slovenian. Before standardizing the test, we conducted a pilot study with 26 subjects from the clinical group who had recently suffered a cerebrovascular event of the left hemisphere (diagnosis code according to IMB-10:R47.0) and were diagnosed with aphasia. They were matched to 26 healthy subjects according to education, first language, gender and age. In this paper, the results of the pilot study are presented and interpreted in the light of the data from the standardization of the test.

Keyphrases: Language Assessment and Diagnostics, Lexicon and lexical access, Naming test, Slovenian, aphasia, language production

@booklet{EasyChair:6508,
  author    = {Barbara Vogrinčič and Mateja Ovčar and Tina Pogorelčnik and Matic Pavlič},
  title     = {Clinical Application of the Slovenian Naming Test: a Pilot Study in Aphasia},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 6508},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2021}}