Development of Revised Token Test in Malayalam

Abstract

Aphasia is a multifaceted disorder. Many authors classified aphasia from different perspectives. Though mostly considered as a disorder .of expression, aphasia encompasses a disorder of comprehension as an inability to understand linguistic utterances, which cannot be attributed to deficient sensory input or generalized cognitive deficits. Token test is a test which can be used to assess the subtle comprehension deficits in brain damaged individuals. It is an accurate and sensitive indicator of the presence of aphasia. The current study focused on developing Revised Token Test in Malayalam (RIT-M). Experimental participants were brain damaged adults (n=9) and controls were normal adults (n=40). Results revealed that as the complexity of the commands increased the performance decreased. Similarly older adults performed poorer compared to younger adults. Normal participants were better in comprehension as compared to the persons with aphasia on all subtests I to X Factors such as sentence length, linguistic complexity, grammatical usage and number of critical stimulus in the commands influenced the test results.