Aphasia following an acquired neurological insult necessitates an in-depth evaluation of the primary and secondary language symptoms. Of all the tools available for aphasia diagnosis, the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB; Kertesz, 1982) has proved to be one of the most comprehensive test batteries for describing the aphasia symptom complex. Several authors have pointed out the need for language-specific tools for the assessment of aphasia. But in Bengali, the most prevalent language in eastern India, no formal language assessment tool was available to date. The present study adapted the original WAB in Bengali to give the Bengali WAB (B-WAB). The study was completed in three phases: development, standardization and validation of the B-WAB. The test material was developed preserving the total number of items, however minor changes were made wherever necessary so that it matched the sociolinguistic norms in this part of the country. It was standardized in a group of 150 normal individuals in five different age groups ranging from 18-70 years, and normative values were provided for each subtest for each group. For establishing validity, it was administered to 30 aphasic subjects and the results indicated that the B-WAB was a valid tool for testing individuals with aphasia.
The findings are interpreted to suggest higher dual-task cost effects in CWS. A potential explanation for this finding requiring further testing and confirmation is that the CWS show reduced efficiency in attending to the tone stimuli while simultaneously prioritizing attention to the phoneme-monitoring task.
We examined eight persons who stutter (PWS) and eight carefully matched adult, control participants for their ability to identify vowel-consonant (VC) syllables and to detect tones in a backward masking paradigm. Speech scores (percent correct) were obtained in quiet and in conditions with a fixed-level broadband masker with a delay of 0 ms and 300 ms. Tonal thresholds (1000 Hz) were obtained using an adaptive procedure in quiet and with the same masker delays as in the speech conditions. The results revealed significantly poorer performance for PWS for all of the speech conditions, including the quiet condition. Tonal thresholds in quiet and for the condition with a 300 ms delay were identical for the two groups, but, on average, the trend was for higher masked thresholds for PWS than for the control group in the 0 ms condition. The poorer speech results are consistent with the idea that PWS may have less distinct representations of phonemic categories that are revealed in a VC task that lacks a language context.
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