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The Multilingual Naming Test in Alzheimer's Disease: Clues to the Origin of Naming Impairments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2013

Iva Ivanova ,
David P. Salmon  and
Tamar H. Gollan
Iva Ivanova
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California
David P. Salmon
Affiliation:
Department of Neurosciences, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California
Tamar H. Gollan*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California
*
Correspondence and reprint requests to: Tamar H. Gollan, 9500 Gilman Drive, 0948, Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0948. E-mail: tgollan@ucsd.edu
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Abstract

The current study explored the picture naming performance of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). First, we evaluated the utility of the Multilingual Naming Test (MINT; Gollan et al., 2011), which was designed to assess naming skills in speakers of multiple languages, for detecting naming impairments in monolingual AD and amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI). If the MINT were sensitive to linguistic impairment in AD, using it in clinical practice might have advantages over using tests exclusively designed for English monolinguals. We found that the MINT can be used with both monolinguals and bilinguals: A 32-item subset of the MINT is best for distinguishing monolingual patients from controls, while the full MINT is best for assessing degree of bilingualism and language dominance in bilinguals. We then investigated the cognitive mechanisms underlying naming impairment in AD. To this end, we explored which MINT item characteristics best predicted performance differences between monolingual patients and controls. We found that contextual diversity and imageability, but not word frequency (nor words’ number of senses), contributed unique variance to explaining naming impairments in AD. These findings suggest a semantic component to the naming impairment in AD (modulated by names’ semantic richness and network size). (JINS, 2013, 19, 1–12)

Keywords

Picture namingBilingualismBilingual index scoresLanguage dominanceFrequencyImageabilityContextual diversityNumber of senses
Type
Research Articles
Information
Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , March 2013 , pp. 272 - 283
Copyright
Copyright © The International Neuropsychological Society 2012

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