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Bilingual Aphasia Test for Korean-English Bilinguals: Norms for a Modified Screening Version

Seongsil Lee1* and Yasmeen Faroqi-Shah1
  • 1 University of Maryland, College Park, United States

Introduction. The Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT, Paradis & Libben, 1987) is one of the few tests designed for assessment of languages in bilinguals with aphasia. When the BAT was originally developed in 1987, it did not utilize normative samples to determine cut-off scores for impaired performance. Instead, it was constructed to be easy enough so that any proficient bilingual could show ceiling performance (80-100%) in each subtest (Paradis & Libben, 1987). However, previous studies investigating performance of neurologically healthy Spanish-English bilingual speakers on the BAT found that subtest performance fell below the 80% criterion and there were performance discrepancies across languages for some subtests (Manuel-Dupont et al., 1992). Further, some individual test items had less than 70% accuracy rate (Muñoz & Marquardt, 2008). These results highlight the importance of empirically establishing norms and equivalence of test difficulty across languages for the BAT (Bates et al., 1991; Ivanova & Hallowell, 2013). The present study addressed the need for establishing bilingual norms by focusing on Korean-English (KE) bilinguals because there is no published research on the psychometric properties of the BAT with neurologically healthy KE bilinguals. The main goal of this study was to test if the 80% ceiling criterion is an appropriate criterion for the adapted screening versions of the Korean-BAT (K-BAT) and English-BAT (E-BAT), and for individual items. The second goal of the study was to examine the comparability of subtest performance across the two languages. Methods. Participants were neurologically healthy and highly proficient Korean-English bilinguals (N=21, mean age= 25.9 years, mean education= 16.2 years). Proficiency in Korean and English was determined by two objective measures (e.g., English or Korean lexical decision tasks) and one self-report questionnaire (the Bilingual Language Profile; Birdsong, Gertken, & Amengual, 2012). The original screening versions of the K-BAT (Park, 2013) and E-BAT (Gomes, Guilhem, Prod’homme, & Köpke, 2012) were modified to correct several errors in instructions, replace ambiguous picture stimuli, and increase the number of picture naming items. Participants completed the adapted screening K-BAT and E-BAT, including Part C (Korean-English translation subtests). Their performance for each subtest was compared across the two languages. The group mean subtest scores were also compared with the 80% cut-off score for each subtest. Additionally, item analysis was performed by deriving an item difficulty (or percent correct) score for each item. Results & Discussion. KE bilinguals performed above 80% ceiling criterion on all subtests; however, their performance differed between Korean and English on the spontaneous speech subtest, Wilcoxon signed ranks, Z = 3.83, p < .001. Moreover, item analysis found seventeen items with an accuracy of less than 80% (see Table 1). Majority of these items (N=14) were from the Part C (Korean-English translation subtests). Our findings, together with those of Manuel-Dupont et al. (1992) and Muñoz and Marquardt (2008), highlight the need to rigorously test and verify psychometric properties of the BAT and the equivalence of test difficulty across languages, as suggested by Roberts (2008).

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the MCM Fund for Student Research Excellence provided by the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park.

References

Bates, E., Wulfeck, B., & MacWhinney, B. (1991). Cross-linguistic research in aphasia: An overview. Brain and Language, 41, 123-148. Birdsong, D., Gertken, L. M., & Amengual, M. (2012). Bilingual Language Profile: An Easy-to-Use Instrument to Assess Bilingualism. Retrieved 08 April, 2012, from COERLL, University of Texas at Austin https://sites.la.utexas.edu/bilingual/ Gomes, S., Guilhem, V., Prod’homme, K. & Köpke, B. (2012) The BAT screening test. A very short version of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT) in 8 languages. NeuroPsychoLinguistic Perspectives on Aphasia, Toulouse, France. Ivanova, M. V., & Hallowell, B. (2013). A tutorial on aphasia test development in any language: key substantive and psychometric considerations. Aphasiology, 27(8), 891-920. Manuel-Dupont, S., Ardila, A., Rosselli, M., & Puente, A. E. (1992). Bilingualism. In R. McCaffrey & A. E. Puente (Eds.), Handbook of neuropsychological assessment: A biopsychosocial perspective (pp. 193–210). New York: Plenum Press. Muñoz, M., & Marquardt, T. (2008). The performance of neurologically normal bilingual speakers of Spanish and English on the short version of the bilingual aphasia test. Aphasiology, 22(1), 3-19. Paradis, M., & Libben, G. (1987). The assessment of bilingual aphasia. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Park, J. (2013). Korean Bilingual Aphasia Test Screening Version. Montreal, Quebec: McGill University. Roberts, P. M. (2008). Aphasia assessment and treatment for bilingual and culturally diverse patients. In R. Chapey (Ed.), Language intervention strategies in aphasia and related neurogenic communication disorders (5th ed., pp. 245– 275). Baltimore, MD: Lippincott Williams & Wilkings.

Keywords: Aphasia, Language assessment, Bilingual, Korean-English bilinguals, Psychometrics

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

Presentation Type: Poster presentation

Topic: Eligible for student award

Citation: Lee S and Faroqi-Shah Y (2019). Bilingual Aphasia Test for Korean-English Bilinguals: Norms for a Modified Screening Version. Front. Hum. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: Academy of Aphasia 57th Annual Meeting. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2019.01.00007

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Received: 29 Apr 2019; Published Online: 09 Oct 2019.

* Correspondence: Ms. Seongsil Lee, University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, United States, sleesincere@gmail.com