THE VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY OF THE VERBAL NAMING TEST

Word finding difficulty (i.e., anomia) is a symptom of several neurological disorders. Well validated instruments exist to assess anomia but are limited in their utility because of their format. The current study provides psychometric data on a new word-finding test, the Verbal Naming Test (VNT), which can be administered orally, therefore making it useful for people with vision impairments and color blindness, and allowing it to be administered by telephone. Seventy-four healthy older adult participants (ages 65–92) were recruited to complete the 52-item VNT, the naming test from the Neuropsychological Assessment Battery (NAB), the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), and the Sentence Repetition subtest of The Wechsler Individual Achievement Test – Third Edition (WIAT-III). A subsample completed a retest of the VNT (mean interval = 4.07 days). Test-retest reliability was good (r = 0.761, p < 0.001). Correlations between the VNT and the NAB were positive and strong (r = 0.730, p < 0.001), suggesting good convergent validity. Good divergent validity was suggested by moderate correlations between the VNT and the MoCA (r = 0.269, p < 0.029) and the VNT and the Sentence Repetition task of WIAT-III (r = 0.383, p < 0.001). Total scores on the VNT were related to age (r = -0.369, p < 0.001) and education (r = 0.499, p < 0.001) and unrelated to gender and self-reported income. This study found the VNT to be an accessible, easy-to-administer measure of naming ability useful in both clinical and research settings.