Evolution of oral and written confrontation naming errors in aphasia. A retrospective study on vascular patients

Impaired naming is a common finding in aphasia but while it is known that naming errors diminish over time, longitudinal studies are rare. In this retrospective study, naming errors of 84 vascular aphasic patients are studied. Errors in oral and written confrontation naming tasks in two successive evaluations are tabulated and coded into one of 19 error types: No Response, Word-Finding Difficulty, Semantic Paraphasia, Unrelated Paraphasia, Phonemic/Orthographic Paraphasia, Neologism, Paraphasic Jargon, Phonemic/Neologistic Jargon, Stereotypy, and Other. All analyses were carried out on the difference scores, that is, the score in the second examination minus the score in the first examination. Results indicate that there is a significant decrease of No Reponses (in oral and written naming) and Neologisms (in oral naming), and a significant increase of Orthographic Paraphasias in written naming. Moreover, the difference score for Phonemic/Orthographic Paraphasias was higher in written than oral naming. The difference scores for the other types of error were not statistically significant.