Purpose:
The prefrontal cortex is highly vulnerable to Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) resulting in the dysfunction of many high-level cognitive and executive functions such as language and word finding. The present study investigates the confronting naming ability in patients with TBI.
Methods:
Present research was a prescriptive-analytic cross-sectional study examined 20 TBI patients (10 male and 10 female), with the age ranged between 18 to 45 years. Participants, with a score above of 20 in Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), were assessed with Persian naming test.
Results:
Our findings demonstrated that the mean of correct answers without cue was 87.9, and the mean of correct answers with semantic and phonological cues were 3.3 and 1.2, respectively. However, the mean of false answers was 4.8, and the mean of no answered questions was 2.8. Furthermore, the mean of semantic and phonological pseudo-words were 4.5 and 0.4, respectively, while the sum of correct answers was noted as 92.4.
Conclusion:
This research differs from other researches in severity of the disorders in population and definition of the naming process. Naming disorder in TBI patients with mild to moderate damage was mild, and semantic pseudo-words were less correct than other words. Therefore, semantic cue could be helpful for word retrieval in TBI patients. Therefore, in these patients to retrieve words, semantic priming may be effective and recommended as a treatment strategy.