Normative data for the Boston naming test in native Dutch-speaking Belgian elderly

A normative study of the 60-item version of the Boston Naming Test (BNT) was performed in a group of 200 native Dutch-speaking Flemish elderly. Analysis of test results revealed that BNT performance in Dutch is significantly affected by age, years of education, and gender. Error analysis disclosed verbal semantic paraphasias to occur as the most frequent error type (1/3 errors). "Don't know responses," verbal semantic paraphasias, and adequate circumlocutions were found on at least 30 different BNT items and constituted the most diffusely distributed error types. Following a careful review of other normative BNT studies, group characteristics rather than cultural differences were found to account for the difference in the overall mean scores. Our study surprisingly revealed that, as far as American-English, Australian-English and Dutch-speaking elderly are concerned, linguistics do not have an impact on the overall mean BNT score. A linguistic impact, however, clearly holds on the qualitative levels of performance, reflected by fundamental differences in the error distribution in different languages. Language-related BNT characteristics therefore stress the need for specific adaptations of norms.