The Aphasia Rapid Test: adaptation and standardisation for Russian

ABSTRACT

Background: The Aphasia Rapid Test (ART) is a screening test developed for fast speech/language assessment of people in the acute stroke period. This test has been developed for French and English and was recently adapted for Portuguese and Italian. Nowadays, such a standardised screening test is in a great need at clinics with Russian-speaking patients. To fill this gap, the ART was adapted for Russian. Aims: The current study investigated whether the Russian ART meets all the psychometric standards, and whether it is suitable for detecting speech/language disorders and estimating their severity, as well as for the evaluation of improvement in the acute post-stroke period.

Methods & Procedure: First, we evaluated the validity, sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, test-retest reliability, inter-item consistency and inter-rater reliability of the test in a group of people with chronic speech/language disorders (N = 55) and in an age-matched control group of non-brain-damaged individuals (N = 50). Participants performed the Russian ART, and their linguistic status was confirmed by the Russian e-version of the Token Test. Second, to test the appropriateness of the Russian ART in the acute post-stroke period, a clinical group of such individuals (N = 43) performed the ART and the Token Test, as well as the Vasserman’s scale which is widely used in Russian clinics. Finally, 16 people in the acute stroke period performed the Russian ART twice to prove that the test can detect early changes in an acute patient’s linguistic status.

Outcomes & Results: The results showed that the Russian ART can be considered as a valid, sensitive, specific, and accurate screening tool with the high test-retest reliability, inter-item consistency, and inter-rater reliability. In the acute post-stroke group, the correlation between the ART and the Token Test was high and significant; a moderate correlation and no significant correlation were found between the Vasserman’s scale and the Russian ART and the Token Test correspondingly. The Russian ART also allowed us to detect the improvement in speech/language status in the acute post-stroke period.

Conclusion: The study confirmed that the Russian ART meets all required standards to be suggested for usage in a Russian-speaking clinical population. This test was relevant for detecting the presence and severity of speech/language disorders and to measure the improvement in the acute post-stroke period.

KEYWORDS:

• Screening test
• standardised
• assessment
• acute stroke
• aphasia
• rating scale

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Roman A. Cheremin and Galina E. Ivanova for their help with organisation of the study and for providing access to people admitted to the Center of Speech Pathology and Neurorehabilitation and City clinical hospital No. 31 of the Moscow Health Department. The authors thank Olga A. Soloukhina, Anastasia A. Shlyakhova and Victoria A. Pozdnyakova for their help with patient recruitment and data collection. We acknowledge all colleagues from the Center for Language and Brain of the National Research University Higher School of Economics for their comments on the manuscript. The authors are grateful to Anna Linden for illustrations for the test. We would also like to express our gratitude to all the participants of the present study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The study was supported by the Сenter for Language and Brain NRU Higher School of Economics, RF Government grant, ag. № 14.641.31.0004.