Noun and Verb Naming in Epilepsy: Evidence from an Italian Cohort

Naming difficulties are the most commonly lamented deficit in epilepsy, with up to forty percent of temporal lobe epilepsy patients reporting struggles with this aspect of cognitive functioning. Nonetheless, naming is often assessed using long established tests that have been suggested to underrepresent this deficiency, with many patients affected by lighter naming deficits being classified as normal. The present study addressed this issue by introducing a new Action Naming Test (Papagno et al., 2020) to the screening and follow-up battery used for epilepsy patients at the Neurological Institute of Milan "Carlo Besta", administering it alongside a short version of the generally recommended Boston Naming Test (Vestito et al., 2023). Fifty-four patients with drug-resistant epilepsy completed both measures. Contrary to expectations, the two tests largely agreed, and among discordant cases it was the Boston Naming Test that flagged impairment twice as often. This asymmetry was clarified by the tests' differing sensitivity to clinical variables: Boston Naming Test performance was predicted by epilepsy laterality, surgery status, age and education years, whereas no variable predicted Action Naming Test performance, pointing to a left-lateralisation bias in noun naming rather than a general superiority of either measure. These findings are discussed in light of current evidence on the localisation of noun and verb networks in the brain, adding to debates regarding their graded overlap and neurological vulnerability.