Comparison of Verbal Fluency and Confrontational Naming in Traumatic Brain Injury Patients

Brain injury is a brain dysfunction disorder. One of the main problems of patients with brain injury is high level language defect, such as naming. Naming test is essential for assessing language content ability. Since improving the ability of naming can have positive effects on patients’ communication, these aspects of speech and language disorders were decided to be investigated in patients with head injury so as to help Speech-language pathologists to design an appropriate treatment plan.
The present cross-sectional study was conducted on 25 hospitalized patients with mild brain injury (20 males and 5 females). Patients were selected based on the Glasgow coma scale (above 13), according to a neurologist diagnosis. Naming assessment was performed using two tests: confrontational naming and verbal fluency.
Intra-class Correlation Coefficient obtained in the first and the second stages of picture naming was 0.856, which is a high reliability index. Patients were better in semantic fluency than in phonemic fluency. Also, pearson correlation test showed a mild to moderate positive correlation between the average picture naming and verbal fluency (r=0.337, p=0.100).
Since naming skill is one of the language neuropsychology tests and its evaluation is important in executive function, assessment of these problems is essential for intervention planning in traumatic brain injury patients.