APA Dictionary of Psychology

a fluency test of word retrieval used to evaluate aphasia. Drawings of objects—ranging in difficulty from the commonly encountered (e.g., tree, bed) to the rarely encountered (e.g., sphinx, abacus)—are presented, and the participant provides the name of each object. The BNT was originally developed in 1978 by U.S. neuropsychologist Edith Kaplan, U.S. clinical psychologist Harold Goodglass (1920–2002), and U.S. neuropsychologist Sandra Weintraub (1946–  ). It is often administered with the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE), a test that Kaplan and Goodglass first developed in 1972 for use in determining the presence and type of aphasia and in assessing its severity by measuring aspects of an individual’s communication ability, including perception (e.g., auditory, visual), processing (e.g., comprehension), and expression (e.g., speech, writing). Both tests remain among the most widely used language-disorder assessment instruments in neuropsychology.