The Study of Noun and Verb Naming in Persian Alzheimer’s Patients and Healthy Adults

Background: Word retrieval deficit is one of the common language problems reported in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Objectives: The present study investigated the noun and verb naming skills in patients with AD according to lexical class compared with healthy counterparts. Methods: In this cross-sectional study, noun and verb naming were investigated in 17 patients with AD [mild to moderate based on the mini-mental state examination (MMSE)] and 17 healthy adults of the same age, gender, and education. To assess, the Persian aphasia naming test (including 50 nouns) and the verb picture naming test in Persian (90 verbs) were used. The data were analyzed with SPSS software version 26, and the significance level was α = 0.05. Spearman’s correlation coefficient was used to analyze the relationship between noun and verb naming test scores in AD and healthy individuals. Additionally, the Mann-Whitney U test was employed to compare the mean scores of the tests between the two groups. Results: The results indicated that both noun and verb naming in people with mild to moderate AD are significantly lower than in healthy adults (P < 0.001). Also, the verb naming deficit in AD is higher than that of nouns (P < 0.001). Conclusions: Naming disorder is one of the most important language disorders in AD, and this problem is seen in verbs more than in nouns in mild to moderate AD. Verb naming deficit can lead to syntactic and eventually communication disorders in these patients.