The Japanese journal of neuropsychology

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ArticleTitle	Lexical processing viewed from the analysis of errors in oral naming in aphasics
Language	J
AuthorList	Naoko Okudaira
Affiliation	Department of Rehabilitation, Tokyo Metropolitan Rehabilitation Hospital
Publication	Japanese Journal of Neuropsychology: 28 (2), 133-144, 2012
Received
Accepted
Abstract	Twenty-two aphasics were examined using an oral naming test to study the relationship between error pattern and severity/recovery. Errors were analyzed in reference to three dimensions (lexicality, semantic similarity to the target, and phonological similarity to the target), yielding six major error types. In less disordered patients who earned more correct responses, lower rates were found for formal paraphasia, irrelevant paraphasia, and neologism, while higher rates of semantic paraphasia and larger value of phonological similarity were obtained, than in severely impaired patients. Seven patients were retested later to access the effects of recovery, which showed declines of the rate of irrelevant paraphasia, while it caused instead rises in the rates of semantic paraphasia and mixed paraphasia. With the improvement of phonological similarity, the rate of neologism decreased and consequently that of phonological paraphasia increased. Thus, the observed correlation between error pattern and severity/recovery was generally consistent with predictions from the interactive activation model by Dell et al. (1997), evidencing the interactivity between processing levels, and suggesting that naming disorder could be caused by global abnormalities of connection weights and/or decay rates. However, some cases showed in fact unusual error patterns that are unpredictable from the model assuming only global lesion, such as "no-responses or semantic paraphasias only" and "phonological errors only", which would imply the necessity for introducing the assumption of local lesion as well into the model. Considering these findings, what intervention should be in the treatment of naming disorder is discussed.
Keywords	oral naming, analysis of errors, paraphasia, interactive activation, globality assumption