title: Spontaneous speech of patients with gliomas in eloquent areas before and early after surgery.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Glioma patients often complain about problems in daily conversation. A detailed spontaneous speech analysis could provide more insight in these communicative problems; no previous studies are reported.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  To select sensitive parameters in spontaneous speech pre- and post-operatively in patients with gliomas in eloquent areas.
  
  
  METHODS
  We included 27 patients and 21 healthy controls. In addition to a naming and category fluency test, spontaneous speech was collected 1 month pre-operatively and 3 months post-operatively, and analysed with the variables: Self-corrections, Repetitions, Lexical Diversity, Incomplete Sentences and Mean Length of Utterance (MLUw). A correlation analysis was performed between the linguistic variables and tumour characteristics (grade, localisation and volume), treatment related factors, and between the linguistic variables and the language tasks.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Pre-operatively, patients produced more Incomplete Sentences than the controls (p < 0.001). Post-operatively, patients' utterance length (MLUw) (p < 0.05) was also deviant. The quality of the spontaneous speech was influenced by tumour grade and localisation. There was no influence of tumour volume or treatment-related factors. Pre- and post-operatively, patients' performance on the naming and the fluency task deviated from normal (p < 0.001). The majority of the linguistic variables did not correlate with the language tasks, pointing to a measurement of distinct linguistic aspects.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Pre- and post-operatively there was a disorder in naming, category fluency and spontaneous speech, partly influenced by tumour characteristics. A spontaneous speech analysis appeared to be a valuable addition to standardised language tasks. Both measurements are important tools to obtain a complete linguistic profile.
authors: Department of Neurosurgery, Erasmus MC-University Medical Center, Dr. Molewaterplein 50-60, PO Box 2040, 3015 GE, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. d.satoer@erasmusmc.nl
authors: Djaina
authors: D
authors: Satoer
authors: Arnaud
authors: A
authors: Vincent
authors: Marion
authors: M
authors: Smits
authors: Clemens
authors: C
authors: Dirven
authors: Evy
authors: E
authors: Visch-Brink
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001932:Brain Neoplasms / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000601:surgery*; D005260:Female; D005910:Glioma / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000601:surgery*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology*; D013997:Time Factors; D016896:Treatment Outcome; D055815:Young Adult