Caution warranted in extrapolating from Boston Naming Test item gradation construct.

Area of Science:

• Neuropsychology
• Linguistics
• Psychometrics

Background:

• The Boston Naming Test (BNT) is a widely used tool for assessing confrontation naming abilities.
• It was theoretically designed with items ordered by word frequency to reflect increasing difficulty.
• Changes in word frequencies over time may impact the BNT's validity.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the ecological frequency of BNT items at publication and assess changes over time.
• To determine if BNT items are presented in order of increasing word frequency.
• To propose a method for creating naming tests with items normally distributed across a language corpus.

Main Methods:

• Identified the ecological frequency of BNT items using the American Heritage Word Frequency Book.
• Analyzed frequency changes over time by comparing BNT items to the Corpus of Contemporary American English.
• Assessed the distribution and differentiation of word frequencies across BNT items.

Main Results:

• Found an uneven distribution of BNT item frequencies across the two corpora.
• Observed negligible differentiation in relative word frequency among many test items.
• Determined that BNT items are not consistently presented in order of increasing frequency.

Conclusions:

• Clinicians and researchers should exercise caution when using the BNT, as its items are not reliably ordered by difficulty.
• The theoretical construct of increasing difficulty based on word frequency may be compromised by temporal changes in language.
• A new method for item selection in naming tests is proposed to ensure normal frequency distribution.