A new test battery to assess aphasic disturbances and associated cognitive dysfunctions - German normative data on the Aphasia Check List

Aphasia, defined as an acquired impairment of linguistic abilities, can be accompanied by a diversity of neuropsychological dysfunction. Accordingly, the necessity to include cognitive testing in the diagnosis of aphasia is increasingly recognized (Helm-Estabrooks, 2002). Here we present the Aphasia Check List (ACL), a new test battery for the assessment of aphasic and associated cognitive disorders. The language part of the battery provides a differentiated profile of important linguistic abilities. In addition, the ACL includes nonverbal screening tests for three neuropsychological domains: memory, attention, and reasoning. Dysfunctions in these domains have been observed in aphasic patients and can have an impact on language function. The ACL is applicable to patients with language disturbances of different etiologies, different stages of disease, and to patients with mild to severe aphasia. As the entire test duration is only about 30 minutes, the ACL is also economically valuable. It thus presents an adequate starting point in aphasia diagnosis for a wide range of patients. Here we describe the construction of the ACL, and the normative study of its original German version with 154 aphasic patients and 106 healthy comparison subjects. The ACL cognition part revealed additional neuropsychological dysfunction in the aphasia group. We present the patterns of these dysfunctions and their correlations with language deficits.