Faulkner Josh W, Wilshire Carolyn E, Parker Andrew J, Cunningham Kay
School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington.
Department of Neurosurgery, Wellington Hospital.
Neuropsychology. 2017 Sep;31(6):648-665. doi: 10.1037/neu0000374. Epub 2017 Apr 6.
To characterize the language impairments that occur in brain tumor patients using a cognitively oriented theoretical framework.
Forty-nine preoperative brain tumor patients completed a new testing protocol (the BLAST) which assesses 8 well documented, "core" cognitive skills required for language: auditory word recognition, accessing semantic knowledge, lexical selection, phonological encoding, verbal short-term memory, goal-driven language selection, verb retrieval, and articulatory-motor planning. Patients were unselected with respect to lesion location.
A surprising 65% of patients scored below controls on at least 1 core skill. Patients with left temporal tumors, as a group, had lower scores than the remaining patients on phonological encoding, accessing semantic knowledge and verbal short-term memory (STM). Those with left frontal tumors had the lowest scores on articulatory-motor planning. These findings are broadly consistent with previous studies examining the anatomical substrates of our "core" cognitive processes.
We conclude that selective impairments in key language skills are common in brain tumor patients, but many of these are not adequately assessed on conventional aphasia assessments. Our protocol may provide a useful resource for preoperative, postoperative and intraoperative language assessment in this population. (PsycINFO Database Record
运用认知导向的理论框架来描述脑肿瘤患者出现的语言障碍。
49名术前脑肿瘤患者完成了一项新的测试方案（BLAST），该方案评估了语言所需的8种有充分文献记载的“核心”认知技能：听觉单词识别、语义知识获取、词汇选择、语音编码、言语短期记忆、目标驱动的语言选择、动词检索和发音运动计划。患者在病变位置方面未做筛选。
令人惊讶的是，65%的患者至少在一项核心技能上得分低于对照组。总体而言，左颞叶肿瘤患者在语音编码、语义知识获取和言语短期记忆（STM）方面的得分低于其余患者。左额叶肿瘤患者在发音运动计划方面得分最低。这些发现与之前研究我们“核心”认知过程的解剖学基础的研究大致一致。
我们得出结论，关键语言技能的选择性损伤在脑肿瘤患者中很常见，但其中许多在传统失语症评估中未得到充分评估。我们的方案可能为该人群的术前、术后和术中语言评估提供有用的资源。（PsycINFO数据库记录）
