English performance of proficient bilingual adults on the Boston Naming Test

Abstract

Background: The Boston Naming Test is widely used in several versions and languages. However, there are few studies of its use with bilingual adults. A recent study by Kohnert, Hernandez, and Bates (1998) found that Spanish/English bilingual adults scored well below unilingual adults. Aims: This study tested two hypotheses. (1) Fluently bilingual adults will obtain significantly lower scores than unilingual, English-speaking adults on the BNT, in English. (2) The order of difficulty of the 60 items will differ for the bilingual and unilingual groups. Methods & Procedures:This study compared the English performance of unilingual speakers (n = 42) to that of two groups of bilingual adults: Spanish/English (n = 32) and French/English (n = 49). All bilingual participants learned English as a second language as children and claimed high levels of ability in English. All participants completed high school (range 11-27 years of schooling). The three groups did not differ significantly in age or education. An ANOVA compared the mean Total Correct obtained by the three groups. Outcomes & Results: Both hypotheses were confirmed. The mean scores (Total Corrrect) for the bilingual groups (42.6 and 39.5/60) were both significantly below the mean score of the unilingual group (50.9/60) but not different from each other. Item difficulty showed some similarities but also important differences across groups. Conclusions: The English language norms cannot be used, even with proficient bilingual speakers. Cultural factors appear less important than bilingualism. Some items on the Boston Naming Test have more than one correct name and suggestions for ''lenient'' scoring are given.

The Development of Scoring Criteria for a New Picture Naming Task

“…Research with French Canadians suggests that the French translation of the BNT does not account for cultural appropriateness, which is important when administering the test in a language other than the one in which it was originally developed (Roberts & Doucet, 2011). Specifically, research suggests that the French translation of the BNT is not acceptable for assessing naming abilities in English-French bilinguals or in monolingual French individuals (Roberts & Doucet, 2011;Sheppard, Kousaie, Monetta, & Taler, 2016).…”

“…Furthermore, bilinguals have demonstrated difficulty with verbal fluency, frequent tip-of-thetongue states, and longer picture naming latencies (Bialystok, 2009), even when completing the task in their dominant language (Gollan & Acenas, 2004). Additional studies have indicated that bilinguals perform worse on naming tasks such as the BNT, both in measures of accuracy (Bialystok, Craik, & Luk, 2008;Kohnert, Hernandez, & Bates, 1998) and response time (Gollan et al, 2005;Gollan, Fennema-Notestine, Montoya, & Jernigan, 2007;Ivanova & Costa, 2008;Roberts et al, 2002).…”

“…Overall, individuals show a decline in naming ability as they age (Kaplan et al, 1983), specifically after the age of 70 (Brouillette et al, 2011). Research examining the utility of the BNT with bilinguals has shown that monolinguals tend to outperform bilinguals and the level of difficulty for the test likely differs between languages (Roberts et al, 2002). For example, in a study comparing English-speaking monolinguals, bilingual Spanish-English speakers, and bilingual English-French speakers, both bilingual groups scored significantly worse than the monolingual English participants (Roberts et al, 2002).…”

“…This research has demonstrated that, relative to monolinguals, bilingual individuals show superior performance on tasks of executive function (e.g., inhibition of task-irrelevant information; Adesope, Lavin, Thompson, & Ungerleider, 2010;Bialystok, 2009;Bialystok, Craik, Green, & Gollan, 2009), but poorer performance on language tasks (e.g., picture naming tasks) (Gollan, Montoya, Fennema-Notestine, & Morris, 2005;Roberts, Garcia, Desrochers, & Hernandez, 2002). In addition, bilingualism can be seen as a protective factor, as research with an immigrant sample living in Toronto has suggested that bilingualism may delay the onset of dementia by five years in older adults (Bialystok, Craik, & Freedman, 2007;Craik, Bialystok, & Freedman, 2010).…”

“…Research examining the utility of the BNT with bilinguals has shown that monolinguals tend to outperform bilinguals and the level of difficulty for the test likely differs between languages (Roberts et al, 2002). For example, in a study comparing English-speaking monolinguals, bilingual Spanish-English speakers, and bilingual English-French speakers, both bilingual groups scored significantly worse than the monolingual English participants (Roberts et al, 2002). Furthermore, bilinguals have demonstrated difficulty with verbal fluency, frequent tip-of-thetongue states, and longer picture naming latencies (Bialystok, 2009), even when completing the task in their dominant language (Gollan & Acenas, 2004).…”