Impact of gender and age on confrontation naming and linguistic facility in aging populations.

Word retrieval often presents a problem for aging populations. The Boston Naming Test (BNT) is a prevalent neuropsychological exam that uses word retrieval to reveal relevant information leading to a diagnosis of cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease or dementia. This study investigated the effects of age and gender on a confrontation naming test. Confrontation naming was assessed using the Boston Naming Test. The sample included 538 participants (185 males, 383 females) individuals residing in South Florida. Participants were divided into two groups, a high cognitive functioning and a low cognitive functioning group, based on the participant’s scores on the mini mental state examination (MMSE). Results did support the hypothesis that age has a significant effect on confrontational naming test ability in both cognitive groups. Conversely, the anticipation that gender would play a role on performance on the BNT for either group was not supported by the results.