Gliomas and naming difficulties in Aphasic Patients
L. MESSINIS, G. ANTONIADIS, P.B. SPIROPOULOU

This research was conducted along the lines of previous studies that aimed to investigate anomia in glioma patients. These studies revealed that anomia i.e. word-finding and naming difficulties was the cardinal aphasic symptom in brain neoplasms. For the purposes of the present research 10 pre-operative glioma patients (3 native English speaking and 7 native Greek speaking patients) were recruited and a repeated measures design was used. The aim of the research was twofold. Firstly, to confirm whether word-finding/naming problems were the main aphasic symptom of glioma patients and secondly -with the aid of the logogen model originally developed by Marrel & Morton (1974) and Morton (1979)- to verify whether, as a consequence of the first assumption, their reading ability would exceed their naming ability, predominantly in cases of severe word finding/ naming problems. This would imply that reading could be achieved via various decoding routes as opposed to naming that can be achieved only via the semantic route. Results indicated that most Greek subjects did not have severe word-finding/ naming problems nor did their reading ability exceed their naming ability. Various explanations are offered in order to explain the discrepancy found between the actual performance of the subjects, the theoretical assumptions inferred by the logogen model, and the findings provided by previous research. In conclusion, it seemed obvious that the logogen model was not adequate in explaining naming and reading performance in Greek glioma patients. This would suggest that the information processing- logogen model may be language sensitive and thus needs to be structurally modified in order to sufficiently explain aphasic symptomatology of Greek speakers in reading and naming. Further longitudinal studies that would incorporate the linguistic structure of the Greek language in the logogen model are needed to investigate and verify the above findings. Moreover it would be interesting to investigate how anomic symptoms correlate with the progression of the disease since glioma disease stage was not a variable considered in the present study.

Key words: Gliomas, naming difficulties, Aphasia, PALPA, Boston Naming Test, Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination, Logogen Model.