The relationship between naming difficulty and FAS performance following traumatic brain injury

To investigate the relationship between naming difficulty (ND) and FAS performance in traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Sixty-three patients with a TBI were divided into two groups based on the presence of a ND and were compared with a control group on FAS performance.

Whilst the group with a TBI performed more poorly than the control group on the FAS task, there was no difference between those participants who featured a ND and those who did not. The TBIs produced fewer words than the control group in the first time slice of the task, but there was no difference between the group with a ND and the non-ND group on this measure.

The results indicate that the effect of word finding deficits is not the principal cause of the diminution of phonemic verbal fluency performance in TBI, which is probably more likely due to compromise in speed of information processing associated with the injury.