Naming in Older Adults: Complementary Auditory and Visual Assessment.

OBJECTIVES

Naming difficulty is a common symptom of multiple age-related neurodegenerative disorders. As naming difficulty increases with age, valid, up-to-date naming assessment tools are crucial for differentiating between neurotypical changes in healthy aging and pathological naming difficulty. We aimed to develop and provide normative data for complementary auditory description naming and visual naming tests for older adults. Furthermore, these measures would include not only untimed accuracy, typically the sole naming performance measure, but also additional scores that incorporate features characteristic of actual word finding difficulty.

METHODS

A normative sample of 407 healthy older adults, aged 56-100 years, were administered the Auditory Naming Test (ANT) and Visual Naming Test (VNT), and other standardized measures.

RESULTS

Item analyses resulted in 36 stimuli for both tests. Age-stratified, education-based normative data are provided for accuracy, response time, tip-of-the-tongue (i.e., delayed, yet accurate responses plus correct responses following phonemic cueing), and multiple Summary Scores. Internal and test-retest reliability coefficients were reasonable (.59-.84). Untimed accuracy scores were high across age groups, seemingly reflecting stability of naming into late adulthood; however, time- and cue-based scores revealed reduced efficiency in word retrieval with increasing age.

CONCLUSIONS

These complementary auditory and visual naming test for older adults improve upon the current standard by providing more sensitive performance measures and the addition of an auditory-verbal component for assessing naming. Detection of subtle naming changes in healthy aging holds promise for capturing symptomatic naming changes during the early stages of neurocognitive disorders involving expressive language, potentially assisting in earlier diagnoses and more timely treatment.