Confrontation naming after anterior temporal lobectomy is related to age of acquisition of the object names

Abstract

Decline in visual confrontation naming ability may occur as a postacute complication of left anterior temporal lobectomy (ATL) for the treatment of intractable mesial temporal lobe epilepsy. In this study of 26 left ATL patients who demonstrated postsurgery decline on a standardized naming measure, it was hypothesized that naming performance would be significantly associated with specific attributes of the object names. We investigated the relation between performance on the Boston Naming Test (BNT) and the following attributes of the test items: living versus nonliving category (L/NL), word length (WL), written word frequency (WF), and age of acquisition (AoA). Regression analyses revealed that AoA and WF were significant predictors of preoperative group performance. AoA was the only significant predictor of performance after left ATL. For the 17 individuals who demonstrated a statistically meaningful decline on the BNT, as indicated by a Reliable Change Index, individual logistic regressions demonstrated that AoA was the strongest and most consistent predictor of postoperative success/failure for items that had been named correctly preoperatively. Consistent with the literature on naming errors in elderly normals and patients with aphasia or semantic dementia, the results provide evidence that object names learned in late childhood are among the most vulnerable when there is a decline in object naming ability. Investigation of additional attributes and semantic knowledge for the concepts represented by the pictured objects will be necessary to determine whether the naming deficit associated with TLE and ATL reflects an impairment of phonological word-form retrieval, semantics, or both.