An evaluation of language in brain tumor patients using a new cognitively motivated testing protocol

To characterize the language impairments that occur in brain tumor patients using a cognitively oriented theoretical framework.

Forty-nine preoperative brain tumor patients completed a new testing protocol (the BLAST) which assesses 8 well documented, "core" cognitive skills required for language: auditory word recognition, accessing semantic knowledge, lexical selection, phonological encoding, verbal short-term memory, goal-driven language selection, verb retrieval, and articulatory-motor planning. Patients were unselected with respect to lesion location.

A surprising 65% of patients scored below controls on at least 1 core skill. Patients with left temporal tumors, as a group, had lower scores than the remaining patients on phonological encoding, accessing semantic knowledge and verbal short-term memory (STM). Those with left frontal tumors had the lowest scores on articulatory-motor planning. These findings are broadly consistent with previous studies examining the anatomical substrates of our "core" cognitive processes.

We conclude that selective impairments in key language skills are common in brain tumor patients, but many of these are not adequately assessed on conventional aphasia assessments. Our protocol may provide a useful resource for preoperative, postoperative and intraoperative language assessment in this population. (PsycINFO Database Record