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Standardizing the Russian Aphasia Test: Normative data of healthy controls and stroke patients

Maria V. Ivanova1, 2*, Olga Dragoy2, 3, Yulia S. Akinina2, 4, Olga A. Soloukhina2, Ekaterina V. Iskra2, 5, Mariya V. Khudyakova2, Ekaterina A. Stupina2, Olga V. Buivolova2 and Tatiana V. Akhutina6
  • 1 University of California, Berkeley, United States
  • 2 National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russia
  • 3 Federal Center for Cerebrovascular Pathology and Stroke, Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University, Russia
  • 4 University of Groningen, Netherlands
  • 5 Center for Speech Pathology and Neurorehabilitation (Russia), Russia
  • 6 Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia

There is a dramatic dearth of standardized tests for assessment of language disorders in Russian speakers. This makes it challenging to reliably evaluate the type and severity of linguistic deficits in individuals with various language disorders, which, in turn, precludes systematic approaches in clinical practice and dissemination of quantitative research. To address this gap in the field of neurogenic language disorders, we developed and standardized a comprehensive aphasia test – the Russian Aphasia Test (RAT). The principal novelty of the RAT is that each subtest corresponds to a specific level of linguistic processing in different language domains: auditory comprehension, repetition, and language production. RAT subtests encompass the following linguistic levels: phonological, lexical, syntactic, and discourse. In the selection of specific tasks for each level of processing, we took into account the structure and materials of contemporary standardized aphasia tests in other languages, as well as modern (psycho)linguistics theories, and the structural and phonetic properties of the Russian language. The comprehension subtests of the RAT include judgment of minimal pairs of nonwords; lexical decision; word to picture matching for both objects and actions; sentence to picture matching for syntactic constructions of varying complexity; comprehension of orally presented stories indexed by response accuracy to a set of 16 yes-no questions on explicit and implicit content of the stories. The repetition subtests contain tasks requiring repetition of nonwords, real words, and sentences of varying length and lexical complexity. The production subtests include naming of both objects and actions; generation of sentences of varying syntactic complexity using a syntactic priming paradigm; and picture description. All the tasks were presented on a tablet, making the RAT the first comprehensive aphasia language test to be fully automatized. This permitted maximal standardization of presentation procedures and scoring (for comprehension tasks only), enhancing reliability. We will show how these tasks are presented on a tablet and how the scoring procedures are implemented. Finally, we will present normative data collected as the first step of RAT standardization. The RAT was administered to 91 patients with different types and severity of aphasia and to 107 age-matched neurologically healthy controls. The healthy controls showed almost perfect performance on the comprehension (mean scores ranging from 96% to 99% correct) and the repetition (mean scores ranging from 95% to 99%) subtests. Slightly greater variability was observed on the language production subtests (mean scores ranging from 94% to 98%, with performance on the sentence generation task being most variable). In general, accuracy declined with age in healthy controls. The patients scored significantly lower than controls on all subtests, showing that all RAT subtests were sensitive to aphasic deficits. Sensitivity and specificity of the RAT for diagnosis of aphasia (relative to clinical impression and non-standardized measures) were established. Based on ROC curve analysis an optimal cut-off score for aphasia was determined. Internal reliability of the subtests was high. Following the establishment of basic psychometric properties, the RAT is ready to be used as an assessment instrument in clinical and research settings.

Keywords: Aphasia, Standardized < Assessment, Aphasia assessment, Language production, Language comprehension, Sensitivity & specificity

Conference: Academy of Aphasia 57th Annual Meeting, Macau, Macao, SAR China, 27 Oct - 29 Oct, 2019.

Presentation Type: Poster presentation

Topic: Not eligible for student award

Citation: Ivanova MV, Dragoy O, Akinina YS, Soloukhina OA, Iskra EV, Khudyakova MV, Stupina EA, Buivolova OV and Akhutina TV (2019). Standardizing the Russian Aphasia Test: Normative data of healthy controls and stroke patients. Front. Hum. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: Academy of Aphasia 57th Annual Meeting. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2019.01.00088

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Received: 07 May 2019; Published Online: 09 Oct 2019.

* Correspondence: Dr. Maria V Ivanova, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, 94720, United States, ivanova@berkeley.edu