The adaptation process of the Comprehensive Aphasia Test into CAT-Turkish: psycholinguistic and clinical considerations

ABSTRACT

Background and Aim

Cross-linguistic adaptations of aphasia assessment tools in Turkey are needed to improve aphasia assessment and rehabilitation with individuals speaking languages other than well-resourced languages. Aligned with this need, we conducted several studies to propose an adaptation of “The Comprehensive Aphasia Test” (CAT) into Turkish.

Methods

During this adaptation process; (a) lexical/linguistic and visual stimuli in CAT’s Language Battery subtests were evaluated by examining their imageability, familiarity, and name agreement features through rating studies, and two pilot studies for (b) Cognitive Screening and (c) Language Battery sections were carried out. In the stimuli norming studies, 71 undergraduate students (aged 20–24) rated 236 words in the Imageability and Familiarity tasks; 40 participants (aged 30–60) named 244 pictures in the Name Agreement task. Two sections of the CAT-TR were administered to different groups of subjects with aphasia (PWA) and matched controls. Fourteen PWA (and 14 controls) were presented the Cognitive Screening section, and a different group (PWA = 20, controls = 20) completed the Language Battery section.

Results

The imageability and familiarity ratings of 236 words and name agreement (% – H statistic) values of 244 pictures were calculated. Imageability and familiarity ratings of the words had a positive strong correlation with each other. Items with a name agreement of 85% or more were considered high name agreement. As anticipated, the control groups both in the Cognitive Screening and the Language Battery sections performed better than the PWA group. As a result, no further adaptive changes were suggested for these sections.

Conclusion

Results of these studies have shown that the Comprehensive Aphasia Test-Turkish is culturally and linguistically appropriate for Turkish speakers with aphasia. Therefore, future studies should assess its validity and reliability, and establish norms for its clinical interpretation.

KEYWORDS:

• Comprehensive Aphasia Test
• adaptation
• aphasia
• assessment
• Turkish

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Anadolu University for the financial support of BAP project (no.1509S632) that let us join ISCH COST Action IS1208, CATs Collaboration. Ethical approval for each study was granted by Anadolu University Scientific Research and Publication Ethics Committee under the same approval number (No. 22472). Special thanks are extended to Carmel Charles Sant for his generous assistance in language editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The adaptation process reported in this study did not include the AIQ-21 as this questionnaire was already adapted and studied with Turkish-speaking PWA (see Yaşar et al., 2021).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Anadolu Üniversitesi [1509S632].