Adaptation of Mississippi Aphasia Screening Test to Telugu Language

Abstract

Aphasia is an acquired language disorder seen in adults which results from stroke or cerebral injury.Most of these patients with severe language disabilities are difficult to assess and may not also be cooperative for lengthy aphasia test batteries like WAB, BDAE etc., hence the need to develop a screening test. Mississippi Aphasia Screening Test is one such instrument developed by Nakase- Thompson (2005) for this purpose. Very few aphasia screening tests have been developed in the Indian context and none for Telugu. Therefore the present study aimed at adaptation of Mississippi Aphasia Screening Test to Telugu (MAST –T). MAST- T consists of Expressive and Receptive indices, under 9 subtests, with a total of 46 items. It was administered on three groups – Neuro-typical group (NT, n=50), Left Hemisphere Damage group (LHD; n=25) and Right Hemisphere Damage group (RHD; n=05). The test displayed good construct, very good criterion validity (r =0.84), and high inter-rater reliability (r=0.993). Overall, LHD group showed more impairment than RHD group on both the subtests. Also the results showed that neuro-typical performed better than both the groups on all the 46 items, except object recognition task which had almost same score for all three groups. Thus, MAST-T is a reliable and valid screening tool for the detection of aphasia for Telugu speaking persons with aphasia.