Normative data for the Boston Naming Test in native Dutch-speaking Belgianelderly

A normative study of the 60-item version of the Boston Naming Test (BNT) wa s performed in a group of 200 native Dutch-speaking Flemish elderly. Analys is of test results revealed that BNT performance in Dutch is significantly affected by age, years of education, and gender. Error analysis disclosed v erbal semantic paraphasias to occur as the most frequent error type (1/3 er rors). "Don't know responses," verbal semantic paraphasias, and adequate ci rcumlocutions 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 dif ferences were found to account for the difference in the overall mean score s. Our study surprisingly revealed that, as far as American-English, Austra lian-English and Dutch-speaking elderly are concerned, linguistics do not h ave an impact on the overall mean BNT score. A linguistic impact, however, clearly holds on the qualitative levels of performance, reflected by fundam ental differences in the error distribution in different languages. Languag e-related BNT characteristics therefore stress the need for specific adapta tions of norms, (C) 1998 Academic Press.