Publisher's Synopsis
This test provides a resource for clinical practice, for aphasia research and for psycholinguistic research. It was developed in response to an acknowledgement of the need for the thorough assessment of verb knowledge in aphasic patients, and with an empasis on the design of therapies that specifically target verb deficits. The materials will also be useful for research into verb processing and representational differences between verbs and nouns, including brain imaging studies.
The Battery consists of line drawings of 162 objects and 100 actions together with ratings for age-of-acquisition, familiarity and imageability of the verbal labels of the pictures. Visual complexity ratings for the pictures, printed word frequency values of the verbal labels, and information about the syntactic realisation of the action labels are also provided. At least 93% name agreement was achieved in collecting naming responses for each the pictures in the Battery from a group of respondents.
The object and action pictures in the Battery are matched on printed word frequency, rated age-of-acquisition, and rated familiarity of the verbal labels. These psycholinguistic variables have been shown to be important predictors of naming performance. The pictures and printed verbal labels can be presented for picture naming, reading, writing to dictation, repetition, semantic classification and can easily be adapted for use in comprehension tests and word-picture verification tasks. The materials can also be used in lexical decision tasks and priming studies.
