engleski

The use of Comprehensive Aphasia Test across languages: insights from Norwegian and Croatian

Aphasia symptoms depend on a range of factors, such as the severity, cause, location and size of the lesion, time post onset, and individual’s age, education, and prior language competence (Eng & Kerman Lerner, 2010 ; Plowman et al., 2012). These factors interact and impact the course of therapy, so it is important to obtain a comprehensive language profile of the individual. Besides, more than half of the world's population is bilingual or multilingual, so there is an urgent need to understand the characteristics of aphasia symptoms in these individuals, and to ensure appropriate assessment and treatment (Goral & Hejazi, 2021). Nevertheless, developing multilingual tests is very challenging for a number of reasons. The need for a reliable and comparable assessment tool across countries was recognized by Working Group 2 within the Collaboration of Aphasia Trialists. Its members agreed to adapt the Comprehensive Aphasia Test - CAT (Swinburn et al., 2004) into their respective languages. Recently, CAT-N (Swinburn, Porter, Howard, Høeg et al., 2021) and CAT-HR (Swinburn, Porter, Howard, Kuvač Kraljević et al., 2020) were normed in Norwegian and Croatian. Since analogous (psycho)linguistic and psychometric decisions were made during test development (Fyndanis et al., 2017), the two tests are expected to be comparable. To examine their comparability, performance on 10 subtests of the Language Battery was compared between the two samples (N group = 71) with equal distribution in terms of age, educational level, and aphasia severity. The conducted analyses revealed a few differences, with the Norwegian sample achieving slightly higher overall results. Interestingly, more specific analyses revealed the main effect of aphasia severity on all dependent variables (individual subtests), while the effect of language was found only in a few subtests. The obtained findings will be discussed with respect to the differences in structural features of the two languages, and concrete research and clinical implications will be emphasized.

Comprehensive aphasia test ; language comprehension ; aphasia ; Croatian ; Norwegian

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