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Sixteen Spanish aphasic patients named drawings of objects on three occasions. Multiple regression analyses were carried out on the naming accuracy scores. For the patient group as a whole, naming was affected by visual complexity, object familiarity, age of acquisition, and word frequency. The combination of variables predicted naming accuracy in 15 of the 16 individual patients. Age of acquisition, word frequency, and object familiarity predicted performance in the greatest number of patients, while visual complexity, imageability, animacy, and length all affected performance in at least two patients. High proportions of semantic and phonological errors to particular objects were associated with objects having early learned names while high proportions of no-response errors were associated with low familiarity and low visual complexity. It is suggested that visual complexity and object familiarity affect the ease of object recognition while word frequency affects name retrieval. Age of acquisition may affect both stages, accounting for its influence in patients with a range of different patterns of disorder. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Parkinson's disease (PD) patients show marked impairments in processing action verbs, and to a lesser extent, concrete (specially, manipulable) nouns. However, it is still unclear to what extent deficits in each of these categories are influenced by more general cognitive dysfunctions, and whether they are modulated by the words' implied motility. To examine these issues, we evaluated 49 non-demented PD patients and 49 healthy volunteers in an oral production task. The patients were divided into two groups depending on the presence or absence of mild cognitive impairment (PD-MCI and PD-nMCI, respectively). Participants named pictures of actions varying in motion content (low and high) and of objects varying in manipulability (low and high). The PD-MCI group showed deficits across all four categories. However, PD-nMCI patients exhibited a selective difficulty for high-motion action verbs. This finding corroborates and refines previous results suggesting that disturbances of action-related lexico-semantic information in PD constitute a sui generis alteration manifested early in the course of the disease's physiopathology. Moreover, it suggests that the grounding of action verbs on motor circuits could depend on fine-grained intracategorical semantic distinctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sixteen Spanish aphasic patients named drawings of objects on three occasions. Multiple regression analyses were carried out on the naming accuracy scores. For the patient group as a whole, naming was affected by visual complexity, object familiarity, age of acquisition, and word frequency. The combination of variables predicted naming accuracy in 15 of the 16 individual patients. Age of acquisition, word frequency, and object familiarity predicted performance in the greatest number of patients, while visual complexity, imageability, animacy, and length all affected performance in at least two patients. High proportions of semantic and phonological errors to particular objects were associated with objects having early learned names while high proportions of no-response errors were associated with low familiarity and low visual complexity. It is suggested that visual complexity and object familiarity affect the ease of object recognition while word frequency affects name retrieval. Age of acquisition may affect both stages, accounting for its influence in patients with a range of different patterns of disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]