Using exploratory analyses to select judges and create the components of a naming test to study aphasia

Aphasia is called the loss of some abilities related to language production and/or comprehension. In the framework of aphasia studies, the ability of the patient to recognize and correctly verbalize a set of images is verified through suitable tests. Since the images are supposed to be easily and unequivocally recognized and named by every person, tailoring images taken from the Snodgrass and Vanderwarts (1980) original test to the Brazilian reality is necessary. We faced the following two issues: the selection of images that are easily recognizable, and the estimate of an index measuring the primitivity of the corresponding word, that is how early in life a person heard the word. To this aim, two surveys have been carried out, where the images were proposed to non-aphasic judges. We report in this paper the results of the exploratory multidimensional analyses carried out to select both images and judges and to define the primitivity index.