Overcoming challenges in name agreement to standardise the CAT in Basque, a minority language in the process of normalisation

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Background There is a lack of standardised aphasia assessment tools in Basque, a language in the process of normalisation, spoken by about 809.000 speakers in the South of France and North of Spain. This may be explained by the Basque complex sociolinguistic situation: its linguistic status (being official or not) and its normalisation differs across territories. Basque has several dialects plus a standard variety, the so-called “Unified Basque” (UB), which was developed in 1968 to be commonly used in the media, administration, and education.Aims A prerequisite for validating the pictures to be included in any CAT adaptation is to achieve a high level of name agreement on these pictures. This paper aims to explain how meeting this criterion was particularly challenging in Basque, given its high dialectal variability, and to present the strategies found to overcome this challenge.Methods & procedures 38 Basque speakers with various dialects, aged 22–84 years old (mean age: 43.97), participated in three picture naming tasks and one word comprehension task. They had to name or recognise a total of 363 pictures presented in four different Google online-surveys.Outcomes & results First, the variability of answers collected from the picture naming tasks demonstrated that dialects are commonly used in Basque including phonological and lexical variants. Second, the results showed that although several expected words were not produced in UB in the picture naming tasks, these words were nonetheless understood in the word comprehension task. Third, participants’ living place and literacy skills in Basque had an impact on the number of accurate words produced in UB.Conclusions This paper supports the idea that to develop reliable aphasia assessment tools, it is crucial to take into account language-specific grammatical properties and sociolinguistic features in addition to key psychometric issues. Some issues emerging from the Basque CAT adaptation might be of particular interest to those in charge of adaptations of assessment tools in minority languages or languages in the process of normalisation.