31 Investigating Race and Performance on the Verbal Naming Test

Abstract

Objective:

Dysnomia may be one of the earlier neuropsychological signs of Alzheimer’ disease (Cullum & Liff, 2014), making it an essential part of dementia evaluations. The Verbal Naming (VNT) is a verbal naming-to-definition task designed to assess possible dysnomia in older adults (Yochim et al., 2015) and has been used as an alternative to tasks that predominately rely on picture-naming paradigms. These researchers investigated the influences of age, educational level, cognitive diagnosis, educational quality, and race to examine if race would be a remaining significant factor in the performance of the VNT.

Participants and Methods:

Black (n=57) and White (n=127) participant data were collected during clinical neuropsychological evaluations, which included the VNT alongside other cognitive measures. A multiple regression was utilized controlling for age, educational level, cognitive diagnosis, educational quality via reading level, and race to investigate if race would remain a significant predictor of test performance.

Results:

Results suggested that race was still a significant predictor (p = .003) of VNT scores despite efforts to control other sources of variance. Additionally, other cognitive measures such as WAIS-IV Block Design (p = .004) and D-KEFS Tower Test (p = .004) also showed statistically significant relationships with race in the same model, whereas verbal memory (CVLT) and verbal fluency (D-KEFS) did not. The NAB Naming analysis violated the assumption of homoscedasticity; therefore, results with the NAB Naming test were not further interpreted.

Conclusions:

These results suggest that race is a significant predictor of performance on some cognitive measures, including the VNT. However, it did not predict performance on verbal memory or verbal fluency. Future investigations of racial differences on neuropsychological test performance would benefit from consideration of variables that may account for discrepancies between White and Black examinees. Several proxy variables could include educational quality, acculturation, and economic status.