An aphasia battery for Qatari/Gulf Arabic
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1
Qatar Univeristy, English Literature and Linguistics, Qatar
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2
Newcastle University, United Kingdom
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3
The University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
Assessment of aphasia in Arabic relies heavily on materials translated from English (e.g. El-Ella et al., 2013), which are driven by the structure of English and hence neglect linguistic peculiarities of the Arabic language. The current project aims to construct a comprehensive aphasia test for application on aphasic Qatari/Gulf Arabic speakers based on a for-purpose developed database of lexical stimuli including pictures and words in the classes of noun, verb and adjective. The resulting test battery is designed taking into consideration the features of the Arabic language and culture.
The project involves 4 phases. In phase one, a comprehensive review of Qatari/Gulf Arabic linguistics and psycholinguistics was conducted in order to identify the crucial elements to be included in the test battery. The results of this analysis informed the design of the aphasia subtests included in the battery. In phase two, a normative database was produced in order to generate stimuli for use in the aphasia subtests. The norms were collected from 160 participants. All were native speakers of Qatari/Gulf Arabic. The database consists of 530 nouns, 250 verbs, and 150 adjectives. The database includes norms for name agreement, naming latency, imageability, visual complexity, age of acquisition, image agreement and familiarity. The database also includes intrinsic features for all items and frequency values taken from the ARALEX database (Boudelaa & Marslen-Wilson, 2010). In the third phase, a comprehensive set of aphasia subtests was generated, including a cognitive screen, a language battery, and a disability questionnaire in line with the Comprehensive Aphasia Test (CAT: Swinburn, Howard, Porter, 2004). Stimuli from the normative database were used to make up the components of the language subtests and to ensure subsets were adequately matched within and across tests. Fifty healthy adult Qatari/Gulf Arabic speakers will participate to generate control data for the battery subtests. Participants will be assessed to yield norms, and to assess the validity and discriminative power of population membership predictability. During the fourth phase, speech and language therapists will administer the prototype battery with aphasic Qatari/Gulf Arabic speakers with aphasia, in Qatar and the UK. Each participant will complete the whole test battery. A subset of these participants will additionally complete the battery on a second occasion to generate reliability data.
We will provide an overview of the normative database, which will be made publicly available via Qatar University’s website for use by researchers and clinicians. This provides additional data to that presented in our recent noun database (Khwaileh et al., 2014). We will provide the prototype test battery including details of the linguistic structures included in each component.
There is a pressing clinical and research need for well-designed and appropriately informed language assessments in Arabic. This project addresses that need by developing test materials that are standardised based on data produced by native Arabic speakers. The test battery will therefore reflect the linguistic features of Arabic and will be culturally appropriate. The test could be copied to other Arabic dialects with minor changes to fit the dialect in question.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the Qatar National Research Fund for funding this project through their National Priorities Research Program grant number NPRP7-1506-3-390.
References
El-Ella, A., Alloush, T.K., El-Shobary, A.M., El-Dien Hafez, N.G., Abd EL-Halim, A.I., & El-Rouby, I.M. (2013). Modification and standardization of Arabic version of the Comprehensive Aphasia Test. Aphasiology, 27:5, 599-614.
Khwaileh, T., Body, R.,& Herbert, R. (2014). A Normative Database and Determinants of Lexical Retrieval for 186 Arabic Nouns: Effects of Psycholinguistic and Morpho-Syntactic Variables on Naming Latency. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 43(6):749-769
Boudelaa, S., & Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (2010). ARALEX: A lexical database for Modern Standard Arabic. Behavior Research Methods, 42, 481-487.
Swinburn, K., Howard, D., & Porter, G. (2004). CAT: The Comprehensive Aphasia Test. Psychology Press.
Keywords:
Aphasia,
assessment,
Arabic,
battery,
test,
agrammatism,
Anomia,
Language,
Stroke
Conference:
54th Annual Academy of Aphasia Meeting, Llandudno, United Kingdom, 16 Oct - 18 Oct, 2016.
Presentation Type:
Platform Sessions
Topic:
Academy of Aphasia
Citation:
Khwaileh
TA,
Mustafawi
E,
Howard
D and
Herbert
R
(2016). An aphasia battery for Qatari/Gulf Arabic.
Front. Psychol.
Conference Abstract:
54th Annual Academy of Aphasia Meeting.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2016.68.00026
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Received:
21 Apr 2016;
Published Online:
15 Aug 2016.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. Tariq A Khwaileh, Qatar Univeristy, English Literature and Linguistics, Doha, Qatar, tariq.khwaileh@qu.edu.qa