Traditional naming tests are unsuitable to assess naming impairment in diverse populations, given the influence of culture, language, and education on naming performance. Our goal was therefore to develop and validate a new test to assess naming impairment in diverse populations: the Naming Assessment in Multicultural Europe (NAME).

We carried out a multistage pilot study. First, we generated a list of 149 potentially suitable items – e.g. from published cross-linguistic word lists and other naming tests – and selected those with a homogeneous age of acquisition and word frequency across languages. We selected three to four colored photographs for each of the 73 remaining items; 194 controls selected the most suitable photographs. Thirteen items were removed after a pilot study in 15 diverse healthy controls. The final 60-item test was validated in 39 controls and 137 diverse memory clinic patients with subjective cognitive impairment, neurological/neurodegenerative disease or psychiatric disorders in the Netherlands and Turkey (mean age: 67, SD: 11). Patients were from 15 different countries; the majority completed primary education or less (53%).

The NAME showed excellent reliability (Spearman–Brown coefficient: 0.95; Kuder–Richardson coefficient: 0.94) and robust correlations with other language tests (ρ = .35–.73). Patients with AD/mixed dementia obtained lower scores on most (48/60) NAME items, with an area under the curve of 0.88. NAME scores were correlated with age and education, but not with acculturation or sex.

The NAME is a promising tool to assess naming impairment in culturally, educationally, and linguistically diverse individuals.

Research on the lateralizing value of neuropsychological tests is limited among Latino people with epilepsy (PWE). This study aims to evaluate the utility of two confrontation naming measures in laterality determination.

Data were collected from 71 Latino PWE who completed the Vocabulario Sobre Dibujos (VSD) and the Pontón-Satz Modified Boston Naming Test (MBNT). Raw and standardized scores were examined to determine diagnostic accuracy for predicting left hemisphere (LH) epilepsy for the full sample and using a sample-specific median split of educational attainment.

The MBNT demonstrated adequate classification accuracy (65.7%, 77.1%) as did the VSD (54.3%, 74.3%) for predicting LH seizure laterality using raw and standardized scores, respectively. For participants with ≥ 9 years of education (HEdu), receiver operator characteristic curve analyses showed a raw/percentile cutoff of ≤ 26/≤ 5th on the VSD, yielding 53%–58% sensitivity/87%–83% specificity. A raw score cutoff of ≤ 17 on MBNT produced 47% sensitivity/78% specificity for HEdu participants.

The VSD was found to have greater flexibility in determining cutoff scores using either raw or standardized scores for predicting seizure laterality. This study provides interpretation guidance, emphasizing education as a pertinent variable, to optimize lateralization accuracy for Latino PWE.