[Colour naming deficit in aphasic and non-aphasic brain damaged patients (author's transl)]

We have examined the severity and quality of aphasic misnaming in colour naming tasks as compared to errors of patients with right-sided brain damage and to patients with posterior disconnexion syndrome. The investigation is based on 80 aphasic patients, 20 patients with right-sided brain damage and 80 normal control subjects. Differences in the performance for colour and object naming are discussed. The main results were: 1. The subtypes of aphasia did not differ quantitatively in both types of performance. All aphasics made significantly more errors on colour naming than on object naming tasks. This difference, however, was numerically too small to have practical value. 2. Unlike in the corresponding understanding tasks, both types of naming tasks differentiated between aphasic and non-aphasic patients, the aphasic group performing poorer. 3. The four subtypes of aphasia had similar error scores in the 10 colour tasks. We observed certain regularities in the type of paraphasic misnaming for the total group of aphasics. The subgroup of amnesic aphasia was characterized by a strategy of modifying the colour terms similar to the description of use encountered in the language behavior of these patients. 4. Patients with posterior disconnexion syndrome in general make 7 errors out of 10 tasks in colour naming, in contrast to 2 errors out of 10 tasks in object naming. For aphasic patients the relation is 3.5 to 2.5 errors.