A guide to designing a naming test for an under-researched bilingual population: adapting the Boston Naming Test to Tongan

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this paper is to provide guidelines on how to develop a naming test for an under-researched language, through adaptation of an English test. An additional consideration is how to make an assessment suitable for bilinguals. While test development involves a number of phases, the focus in this research is on test construction. To illustrate the steps required for this, a Tongan adaptation of the Boston Naming Test (BNT) for Tongan–English bilinguals is discussed. In the adaptation, language structure and cultural appropriateness are considered in item selection. This version retains just 7 of the original BNT words and includes 15 words of particular importance in Tongan culture. As the items in the BNT are ordered according to naming difficulty, the authors also consider how to determine graded difficulty for Tongan words, in the absence of a Tongan corpus or established information on word frequency/difficulty. This issue is resolved by asking Tongan–English bilinguals (n = 20) to rate a list of 175 words for frequency and familiarity. From this set, 120 words were then selected and presented as a picture naming assessment to an additional group of bilinguals (n = 42). Their responses were analysed according to accuracy and speed. A final list of 70 words with pictures was ordered on the basis of these responses for the next step of testing.