Revised and extended norms for a picture naming test sensitive to category dissociations.

This study presents revised and extended norms for a picture naming test [Laiacona et al. (Arch Neurol Psicol Psichiatr 54:209-248, 1993)], based on 80 Snodgrass and Vanderwart (J Exp Psychol Human Learn Mem 6:174-215, 1980) pictures, devised to detect a categorical dissociation in the naming of items between biological and man-made categories. This survey is based on data from 215 healthy Italian participants.

Does sex influence the age of acquisition of common names? A contrast of different semantic categories.

The literature reports a sex-related asymmetry in the ability to process different semantic categories: women are more proficient with biological categories and men with man-made objects. The origin of this asymmetry is still debated. In this study, we directly checked whether the acquisition of names belonging to different semantic categories differs according to sex.

Objective versus estimated age of word acquisition: a study of 202 Italian children.

We provide objective data concerning the age of acquisition (AoA) of words from 202 Italian children 34-69 months of age. We investigated picture naming with 80 concrete words belonging to eight semantic categories that are included in a widely used battery for the study of naming and semantic memory. For each word, we calculated three different indices: two directly expressing the age at which a picture was given the correct name by at least 75% of the subjects, and one expressing the overall percentage of our children who were correct in the task.

Animals recover but plant life knowledge is still impaired 10 years after herpetic encephalitis: the long-term follow-up of a patient.

In this study we report the long-term follow-up of EA, a patient originally affected by a disproportionate semantic impairment of biological categories due to herpetic encephalitis. After 10 years, EA still presented a biological categories semantic impairment, but his deficit had become minimal for animals while it remained considerably severe for fruit and vegetables, without any evolution from the original level of impairment. The eventual discrepancy between the two subsets of biological categories was statistically significant at word-picture matching and verbal semantic probes (and could not be explained by nuisance variables), but not significant at picture naming due to an associated lexical impairment that, besides plant life items, also affected animals and artefact stimuli.