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Revue de neuropsychologie. Volume 3, Number 1, 52-69, Mars 2011, Article méthodologique

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Author(s) : Thi Mai Tran, Olivier Godefroy

Summary : The “Batterie d’Evaluation des Troubles Lexicaux” has been designed to examine acquired disorders of language in adults. It includes 54 items (drawings) used in 3 tasks: confrontation naming, pointing, semantic matching. This battery is intended to assess 3 critical lexical processes: oral naming, oral comprehension and semantic processing. Its implementation on microcomputer provides automatically the categorization of the response (hits vs errors) and response time. The objective of the paper is to describe the battery and to report performance observed in 369 healthy participants (20 to 95 years\; 3 socio-cultural levels). We assessed the intra- and inter-examiner reliability, the effect of demographic (age, socio-cultural level, sex) and linguistic factors (length, frequency and semantic category) and provided preliminary cutoff scores. Response agreement was found to be good and reliability, very good. The effects of demographic (age, socio-cultural level) and linguistic factors were significant on both response time and accuracy whereas the sex effect was absent or minor. The preliminary cutoff scores are provided.They will be refined in a future study including a larger sample and in a validation study in neurological patients.

Keywords : aphasia, assessment, lexical processes, semantic memory