Montreal Communication Evaluation Brief Battery – MEC B: reliability and validity

Abstract

Purpose Search for reliability and validity evidence for the Montreal Communication Evaluation Brief Battery (MEC B) for adults with right brain damage. Methods Three hundred twenty-four healthy adults and 26 adults with right brain damage, aged 19-75 years, with two or more years of education were evaluated with MEC B. The MEC B Battery contains nine tasks that aim to evaluate communicative abilities as discourse, prosody, lexical-semantic and pragmatic process. Two sources of reliability evidence were used: internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha) and interrater reliability. Construct validity was evaluated comparing the Montreal Communication Evaluation Battery (MEC), expanded version and MEC B tasks. Results Internal consistence was satisfactory and the interrater reliability was considered excellent, as were correlations between MEC Battery and MEC B Battery tasks. Conclusion The MEC B Battery showed satisfactory reliability and validity evidences. It can be used as outcome measure of intervention programs and assist speech therapists to plan rehabilitation programs.

Assessment of Pragmatic Abilities and Cognitive Substrates (APACS) Brief Remote: a novel tool for the rapid and tele-evaluation of pragmatic skills in Italian

“…It is indeed possible that in clinical samples with pragmatic difficulties the correlation between the two tests would be based on a wider range of scores, hence tighter and stronger in magnitude. Finally, it is to note that the items included in the APACS Brief Remote test are not a subset of the items of the APACS test, but rather a new set of items, administered in another modality: the obtained correlation value aligns with coefficients reported in the literature between another full-length battery of pragmatics, namely the MEC, and its shorter version based on a novel set of items, namely MEC B (across MEC scales, .05 < ρ < .69, Casarin et al, 2020). However, we cannot rule out that the APACS Brief Remote and the APACS test have a different granularity in assessing pragmatics, in terms of fine description of the pragmatic profile.…”

“…Several tools for rapid cognitive screening (i.e., within a 15-minute duration) are available to use when extensive neuropsychological evaluation is not necessary, and they are considered an optimal choice to monitor the course of an illness or treatment outcome (Mondini et al, 2022). Yet there are no tools for rapid pragmatic assessment (the MEC Brief -available only for Brazilian Portuguese -has still a considerable duration: 25-40 minutes Casarin et al, 2020), and the available ones can hardly be incorporated into routine assessment of patients with suspected pragmatic language disorder. A further issue is represented by the poor availability of tests with alternate forms.…”

Brief Montreal-Toulouse Language Assessment Battery: adaptation and content validity

“…Extensive aphasia assessment batteries may be too tiring for patients with complex clinical conditions (Casarin et al, 2020). After an acute stroke, for instance, many patients are unable to undergo prolonged evaluations (Marshall & Wright, 2007).…”