Bell B D, Davies K G, Hermann B P, Walters G
Department of Neurology, University of Wisconsin, Madison 53792, USA.
Neuropsychologia. 2000;38(1):83-92. doi: 10.1016/s0028-3932(99)00047-0.
Decline in visual confrontation naming ability may occur as a postacute complication of left anterior temporal lobectomy (ATL) for the treatment of intractable mesial temporal lobe epilepsy. In this study of 26 left ATL patients who demonstrated postsurgery decline on a standardized naming measure, it was hypothesized that naming performance would be significantly associated with specific attributes of the object names. We investigated the relation between performance on the Boston Naming Test (BNT) and the following attributes of the test items: living versus nonliving category (L/NL), word length (WL), written word frequency (WF), and age of acquisition (AoA). Regression analyses revealed that AoA and WF were significant predictors of preoperative group performance. AoA was the only significant predictor of performance after left ATL. For the 17 individuals who demonstrated a statistically meaningful decline on the BNT, as indicated by a Reliable Change Index, individual logistic regressions demonstrated that AoA was the strongest and most consistent predictor of postoperative success/failure for items that had been named correctly preoperatively. Consistent with the literature on naming errors in elderly normals and patients with aphasia or semantic dementia, the results provide evidence that object names learned in late childhood are among the most vulnerable when there is a decline in object naming ability. Investigation of additional attributes and semantic knowledge for the concepts represented by the pictured objects will be necessary to determine whether the naming deficit associated with TLE and ATL reflects an impairment of phonological word-form retrieval, semantics, or both.
视觉对答命名能力下降可能作为左侧前颞叶切除术（ATL）治疗难治性内侧颞叶癫痫的急性后期并发症出现。在这项针对26例接受左侧ATL手术且在标准化命名测试中表现出术后能力下降的患者的研究中，研究假设命名表现将与物体名称的特定属性显著相关。我们调查了波士顿命名测试（BNT）的表现与测试项目的以下属性之间的关系：生物与非生物类别（L/NL）、单词长度（WL）、书面单词频率（WF）和习得年龄（AoA）。回归分析显示，习得年龄和单词频率是术前分组表现的显著预测因素。习得年龄是左侧ATL术后表现的唯一显著预测因素。对于17例在BNT上表现出具有统计学意义下降的个体（可靠变化指数表明），个体逻辑回归显示，对于术前正确命名的项目，习得年龄是术后成功/失败的最强且最一致的预测因素。与关于老年人正常人群以及失语症或语义性痴呆患者命名错误的文献一致，结果提供了证据表明，在童年后期习得的物体名称在物体命名能力下降时是最易受影响的。有必要对图片物体所代表概念的其他属性和语义知识进行研究，以确定与颞叶癫痫和ATL相关联的命名缺陷是否反映了语音词形检索、语义或两者的损伤。
