About

The Moss Aphasia Psycholinguistic Project Database gives researchers access to experimental behavioral data from participants with aphasia.. The web database represents years of data collection from participants who exhibited language impairments secondary to chronic left hemisphere stroke. Most were recruited to the research program at Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute (MRRI).

The core of the database is individual-trial performance data from picture naming -- a primary test of lexical processing. The task taps a critical juncture in the language system because naming mediates between high-level conceptual and syntactic processing and low-level phonological processing. Difficulty in this task is present to varying degrees in nearly all individuals with aphasia.

This site allows researchers to search through naming data from over 300 participants with aphasia and 20 controls. Searches can provide data based on participant characteristics (e.g. time since aphasia onset, clinical diagnosis), stimulus characteristics (e.g. semantic category, lexical frequency) and task performance (e.g. error type). Participant performance on an extensive battery of other language and cognitive tests is also included in the database. The battery includes tests of speech perception and spoken word recognition, semantic memory, verbal short-term memory, and sentence comprehension. The data available on this site can be used to test hypotheses about naming impairment and aphasic impairment generally. Once the basic analysis tools of the site are exhausted, users can export the raw data for further analysis and visualization.

Disclaimer

This database is part of a long-running project. We have done our best to maintain data consistency, but over the many years of the project, the test battery has evolved -- some tests have been added, other tests excluded. To provide the most comprehensive data set to other researchers, we have included these tests even though not all participants completed all tests. In addition, some scoring procedures have evolved with our developing understanding of the critical patterns of performance. These changes have been quite minor and we have done our best to document our scoring procedures and to make them as transparent as possible, but users should be aware that reasonable people can (and do) disagree about the precise definitions of, for example, form errors or the effects of apraxia of speech.

This database project is also on-going. We will periodically update the data set with new data. These updates will be also documented, but users should be aware that certain kinds of searches may produce different results when re-run on a larger data set.

As stated in the Terms of Use, these data should only be used to study how the ability to produce and understand language is affected by a neurological event like stroke or head injury.

Citing

Please use the following citation in publications: 

Mirman, D., Brecher, A., Walker, G.M., Sobel, P., Dell, G.S., & Schwartz, M.F. (2010). A large, searchable, web-based database of aphasic performance on picture naming and other tests of cognitive function. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 27(6), 495-504. DOI:10.1080/02643294.2011.574111

Contacts

If you are having a problem with the site and wish to report a bug, please email fahas@einstein.edu. You can also make feature requests or send in miscellaneous comments. Questions about the data (variables, measures, etc.) can also be directed to Dan Mirman (dan@danmirman.org) or Adelyn Brecher (abrecher@einstein.edu)

Credits

MAPPD was created by the  Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute (MRRI). Dr. Daniel Mirman led the website development, Dr. Myrna Schwartz is Associate Director of MRRI and Principal Investigator on the Moss Aphasia Psycholinguistic Project (funded by a long-running grant from the NIH: R01DC000191). Other project contributors are Adelyn Brecher, Paula Sobel, Grant Walker and Gary Dell.

Phonetic Fields

Phonetic fields are encoded using SIL IPA93 fonts. SIL IPA