MULTIMAP: Multilingual picture naming test for mapping eloquent areas during awake surgeries

Sandra Gisbert-Muñoz,Polina Timofeeva,Santiago Gil-Robles,Ileana Quiñones,Iñigo Pomposo,Sami Boudelaa,Manuel Carreiras,Shuang Geng,Lucia Amoruso

doi:10.3758/s13428-020-01467-4

Abstract

Picture naming tasks are currently the gold standard for identifying and preserving language-related areas during awake brain surgery. With multilingual populations increasing worldwide, patients frequently need to be tested in more than one language. There is still no reliable testing instrument, as the available batteries have been developed for specific languages. Heterogeneity in the selection criteria for stimuli leads to differences, for example, in the size, color, image quality, and even names associated with pictures, making direct cross-linguistic comparisons difficult. Here we present MULTIMAP, a new multilingual picture naming test for mapping eloquent areas during awake brain surgery. Recognizing that the distinction between nouns and verbs is necessary for detailed and precise language mapping, MULTIMAP consists of a database of 218 standardized color pictures representing both objects and actions. These images have been tested for name agreement with speakers of Spanish, Basque, Catalan, Italian, French, English, German, Mandarin Chinese, and Arabic, and have been controlled for relevant linguistic features in cross-language combinations. The MULTIMAP test for objects and verbs represents an alternative to the Oral Denomination 80 (DO 80) monolingual pictorial set currently used in language mapping, providing an open-source, standardized set of up-to-date pictures, where relevant linguistic variables across several languages have been taken into account in picture creation and selection.

Highlights

We present MULTIMAP, a new multilingual battery of standardized pictures in Spanish, with norms for Basque, Catalan, Italian, French, English, German, Mandarin Chinese, and Arabic
To address these shortcomings and the critical demand for multilingual material, we developed a multilingual picture naming test (MULTIMAP) for the mapping of eloquent areas during awake brain surgery
We first created a list for each language, selecting the same number of nouns and verbs, and ensuring that there were no significant differences across the linguistic values we controlled for using unpaired two-sample t tests

Summary

Introduction

We present MULTIMAP, a new multilingual battery of standardized pictures in Spanish, with norms for Basque, Catalan, Italian, French, English, German, Mandarin Chinese, and Arabic This is a tool that will allow surgical teams to test patients in bilingual contexts in a controlled and comparable manner. As for nouns, only some studies have reported controlling their stimuli for the relevant linguistic variables or have described how these stimuli were constructed and selected To address these shortcomings and the critical demand for multilingual material, we developed a multilingual picture naming test (MULTIMAP) for the mapping of eloquent areas during awake brain surgery. To facilitate replication and extension to other languages in future research

Participants

Results

Discussion

Compliance with ethical standards