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Using the Arizona Battery for Communication Disorders of Dementia in the UK
Author(s) -
ARMSTRONG LINDA,
BORTHWICK SHEENA
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
international journal of language and communication disorders
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.101
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1460-6984
pISSN - 1368-2822
DOI - 10.1111/j.1460-6984.1995.tb01717.x
Subject(s) - dementia , test (biology) , psychology , raw score , population , multivariate analysis of variance , boston naming test , vocabulary , sample (material) , gerontology , disease , audiology , medicine , raw data , linguistics , paleontology , statistics , philosophy , chemistry , mathematics , environmental health , pathology , chromatography , machine learning , computer science , biology
Appropriate and dedicated communication assessments for people with dementia are still limited. The Arizona Battery for Communication Disorders of Dementia (ABCD) (Bayles & Tomoeda, 1993) was until recently the only formal and standardised battery available to clinicians. It is conceptually strong and clinically appropriate in its primary aim to quantify the linguistic communication deficits associated with Alzheimer's disease. However, its standardisation data were gathered using American subjects. The study reported here was undertaken to answer two main questions. Do older people in the UK (with and without dementia) achieve scores similar to those gained by the American subjects? Are the test items appropriate for an elderly UK population? A subsidiary question considered whether young people in the UK produced similar scores to those produced by the young standardisation sample in the USA. Nineteen young people, 20 normal old people and 13 older people with moderate Alzheimer's disease were given the ABCD. Modifications were made to the wording but not the sense of test instructions and three changes in vocabulary in the story retelling test were made. None of the written word or picture stimuli was changed. A series of independent tests were performed on the raw score data by use of MANOVA. Only four from 51 pairings of UK/USA subjects' performance on ABCD subjects showed significant difference in mean score. Three groups of UK subjects produced raw score profiles very similar to those of the standardisation sample of the test. There is anecdotal evidence that some of the word and picture stimuli were confusing to the UK subjects. However, since these did not seem to influence performance adversely, no major changes to the published version are indicated. The very low mean scores produced by the moderate Alzheimer's disease subjects (typical of the client with Alzheimer's disease referred for speech and language therapy assessment here) suggests that the ABCD demonstrates their deficits rather than their assets. The Functional Linguistic Communication Inventory (Bayles & Tomoeda, 1994) is likely to be the test of choice for this group.