Predicting confrontation naming item difficulty.
Gerasimos Fergadiotis, Alexander Swiderski, William D Hula
PMID 31462841WHAT IT FOUND
Naming speed from 44 healthy adults helped predict how hard each Philadelphia Naming Test picture is, alongside word frequency, age of acquisition and word length.
Key findings
01Mean naming latencies were collected for all 175 PNT items from 44 healthy adults.
02A regression model predicted PNT item difficulty and explained .699 of the variance, with adjusted .692.
03Higher word frequency was associated with lower item difficulty, while later age of acquisition, longer words and longer naming times were associated with higher item difficulty.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The response times came from 44 cognitively healthy adults with mean age 28.4, while the item difficulty estimates came from 251 people with aphasia with mean age 58.8. The model predicts a difficulty parameter for existing PNT items and is not shown to work for new naming tests or to change patient outcomes. Some response times were missing, especially for slipper with 27 missing responses, and the item nurse was removed as an outlier. The authors state the model is not intended to explain word production stages, only to predict item difficulty.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that a naming treatment works or that healthy response times can diagnose aphasia. The study predicts difficulty of Philadelphia Naming Test items from word properties and naming speed.