Nickels L, Howard D
Department of Psychology, Birkbeck College, University of London, U.K.
Neuropsychologia. 1995 Oct;33(10):1281-303. doi: 10.1016/0028-3932(95)00102-9.
This paper investigates the factors which affect naming performance for two groups of aphasic subjects. The effects of word age-of-acquisition, operativity, frequency, familiarity, imageability, concreteness, length and the visual complexity of the stimulus picture were examined. In contrast to previous studies, we found remarkably small effects of word frequency on naming performance; these studies, we argue, have failed to control sufficiently for the effects of variables which intercorrelate with frequency. However, many patients were significantly affected by age-of-acquisition even when any effects of frequency and familiarity had been accounted for. Operativity, imageability and word length were also predictive of naming performance for some of the patients investigated, unlike visual complexity. The applicability of conclusions drawn from groups of aphasics is again thrown into doubt, as these two groups showed different patterns of predictor variables, and the variables affecting the performance of individuals could be different from those affecting the group.
本文研究了影响两组失语症患者命名表现的因素。研究考察了词汇习得年龄、可操作性、频率、熟悉度、形象性、具体性、长度以及刺激图片的视觉复杂性的影响。与之前的研究不同，我们发现词汇频率对命名表现的影响非常小；我们认为，这些研究未能充分控制与频率相互关联的变量的影响。然而，即使在考虑了频率和熟悉度的任何影响之后，许多患者仍受到习得年龄的显著影响。与视觉复杂性不同，可操作性、形象性和单词长度对部分被研究患者的命名表现也具有预测作用。由于这两组患者表现出不同的预测变量模式，而且影响个体表现的变量可能与影响群体的变量不同，因此从失语症患者群体得出的结论的适用性再次受到质疑。
