Word-finding as a function of stimulus context: Children compared with aphasic adults

A study of object naming in 202 children, aged 5–11 years, demonstrated that varying the stimulus context affected the level of response accuracy. From age 6 to 10, completing a sentence with a noun (auditory) yielded the lowest error scores, naming objects upon hearing a definition (also auditory) produced most errors, while responding with names to pictured objects was of intermediate difficulty. This is the same order of object naming difficulty found in adult aphasic patients. Children older than 10 do not appear to be affected by stimulus context in their object naming. Results are discussed in terms of the relative syntactic difficulty of the two auditory conditions, the unexpected sex differences, and the “aphaseoid” naming errors of children.     

Rapid silent response to repeated target symbols by dyslexic and nondyslexic children

A previous study demonstrated that naming of repeated colors, objects, letters, and numbers (RAN test) was performed more slowly by dyslexic than by nondyslexic learning disabled children, whereas both groups were slower than controls. A test eliminating the vocal response and requiring “cancellation” of selected verbal targets distinguished the two learning disabled groups from each other only when the targets were triads of numbers or letters, the dyslexic group performing more slowly. Compared even with triad target selection, however, dyslexic children were relatively more impaired on rapid naming (RAN), suggesting a specific relationship of reading to speech or the greater mobilization of language functions which speech requires.