Response Latencies During Confrontation Picture Naming in Aphasia: Are Proxy Measurements Sufficient?

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Speech and Language Pathology
• Psycholinguistics

Background:

• Anomia, or word-finding difficulty, is a common symptom of aphasia, a language disorder affecting millions.
• Accurate assessment of anomia is crucial for monitoring patient progress and treatment outcomes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the reliability of response time (RT) annotation using spectrograms.
• To assess the predictive utility of proxy RTs obtained from computerized naming tests.

Main Methods:

• Phonemic transcription and RT measurement of responses from 10 individuals with aphasia.
• Comparison of hand-generated RTs (from spectrograms) with automatically extracted proxy RTs.
• Statistical analysis using interclass correlation coefficients, generalizability theory, and linear mixed-effects models.

Main Results:

• Near-perfect interrater agreement (φ = .93) for RT annotation, with negligible rater variance.
• Proxy RTs significantly predicted hand-annotated RTs (R² ≈ 0.82), demonstrating strong utility.
• Negligible variance accounted for by raters indicates high reliability.

Conclusions:

• RT annotation in anomia assessments is reliable.
• Proxy RTs from computerized tests serve as a valid alternative for measuring response times.
• Integrating proxy RTs can improve clinical assessments and cognitive measurements for individuals with aphasia.