Confrontation naming errors in Alzheimer's disease

Abstract

Background/aims: Impairment in visual interpretation, semantic conception, or word retrieval may contribute to the naming errors identified in the Boston Naming Test (BNT). We investigated the possible cognitive mechanism of the naming difficulty in Alzheimer's disease (AD) by analyzing the error patterns presented in the BNT.

Methods: The Chinese version of the 30-item BNT (BNT-30) was performed on 115 normal control (NC) subjects and 104 mild-to-moderate AD patients. Accurate rates after semantic and phonemic cues were analyzed. The frequencies of 7 types of error patterns in the AD patients and the NC subjects were compared.

Results: The accurate rate after semantic cues was significantly lower in the AD than in the NC groups, but phonemic cues were more helpful than semantic cues to achieve accurate naming in both groups. The AD patients made more errors in all error patterns. Particularly, the frequency of nonresponse errors (n = 806) in the AD group significantly exceeded that in the NC group (n = 382). However, the distribution of the error patterns did not differ between the two groups.

Conclusion: Naming difficulties in AD might be attributed to progressive semantic knowledge degradation. The AD and the NC groups differ quantitatively but not qualitatively in the error patterns in confrontation naming.