Browsing by Author "Ngoie-Gräsbeck, Elvira"

Objectives. Aphasia is a language disorder acquired after language learning caused by brain damage. The most common cause of aphasia is stroke. Word-finding or naming difficulty is one of the most common symptoms of aphasia. Naming refers to the retrieval of a specific lexical item, while a naming error refers to the errors a person makes while trying to retrieve a certain word. The aim of this master’s thesis is to examine the naming errors made by subacute aphasic individuals, chronic aphasic individuals, young healthy controls and healthy age-matched controls in a new word learning task. Additionally, differences in the number of correctly named items and naming errors between groups are examined. Methods. In this thesis the naming errors made by young healthy controls (n = 21), healthy age-matched controls (n = 21), chronic aphasic individuals (n = 4) and subacute aphasic (under 3 months post-onset) individuals (n = 10) during a new word naming task were examined. During the learning task participants practiced six pseudowords, phonologically similar to Finnish words, and their picture referents. Learning was measured by a naming task performed immediately after the learning task as well as a week later. The naming errors made by the participants during the naming task were examined quantitatively and qualitatively and differences between groups were compared. Results and conclusions. There were differences between the groups in the number of correctly named objects and the types of naming errors. In all research groups, some subjects managed to name some new words correctly. The young controls performed best in the naming task. The age-matched controls performed better than the chronic aphasic individuals, and the subacute aphasic individuals performed the worst. In controls, the most common type of naming error was phonological paraphasia, and in aphasic individuals, omission. The young controls did not name any objects with real words, but such naming errors occurred in the other groups. The subacute aphasic individuals produced more feature descriptions than the other groups, and only the controls produced correct descriptions of phonetic form. The new word naming task was especially challenging for individuals with aphasia. However, the results of this thesis show that learning can also be seen in responses that are not completely correct. A more comprehensive picture of the differences between groups in naming errors and their possible relationship with learning ability would be obtained with larger research groups, which would enable statistical analysis of the data.