Validation of and Normative Data of the DVAQ-30, a New Video-Naming Test for Assessing Verb Anomia.

OBJECTIVE: Anomia is usually assessed using picture-naming tests. While many tests evaluate anomia for nouns, very few tests have been specifically designed for verb anomia. This article presents the DVAQ-30, a new naming test for detecting verb anomia in adults and elderly people. METHOD: The article describes three studies. Study 1 focused on the DVAQ-30 development phase. In Study 2, healthy participants and individuals with post-stroke aphasia, mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer's disease, or primary progressive aphasia were assessed using the DVAQ-30 to establish its convergent and discriminant validity, test-retest reliability, and internal consistency. In Study 3, a group of adults and elderly Quebec French-speaking adults were assessed to obtain normative data. RESULTS: The DVAQ-30 had good convergent validity and distinguished the performance of healthy participants from that of participants with pathological conditions. The test also had good internal consistency, and the test-retest analysis showed that the scores had good temporal stability. Furthermore, normative data were collected on the performance of 244 participants aged 50 years old and over. CONCLUSIONS: The DVAQ-30 fills an important gap and has the potential to help clinicians and researchers better detect verb anomia associated with pathological aging and post-stroke aphasia.

Improving verb anomia in the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia: the effectiveness of a semantic-phonological cueing treatment.

The semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) is known to affect the comprehension and production of all content words, including verbs. However, studies of the treatment of anomia in this disorder focused on relearning object names only. This study reports treatment of verb anomia in an individual with svPPA. The semantic-phonological cueing therapy resulted in significant improvement in naming abilities, for treated verbs only. This case study demonstrates that improvement in verb-naming abilities may be possible in svPPA. The almost complete maintenance of the treatment's effects in the patient 4 weeks after the end of the therapy also suggests improvements may be durable, at least in the short term, for some individuals with svPPA.