Black and White Adults' Expressive Language Performance on Three Tests of Aphasia

cmolrine{at}edinboro.edu

Few or no Black adults have been included in normative samples for tests of aphasia, nor have test and item bias with Black adults been evaluated for such popular tests as the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE; Goodglass & Kaplan, 1983), the Minnesota est for Differential Diagnosis of Aphasia (MTDDA; Schuell, 1965), and the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB; Kertesz, 1982). To address this, group differences were investigated in expressive language test performance on the BDAE, MTDDA, and WAB by 48 nonbrain-damaged Black (n=24) and White (n = 24) adults. Each test was administered by a White female examiner and audiotaped. The responses of subjects and subject foils with aphasia were scored by graduate speech-language pathology students who were blind to the purpose of the study. A comparison of the test scores on the expressive language subtests revealed that, with the exception of three subtests, there were no statistically significant differences in obtained scores for upper and middle SES subjects. Those differences that were found were not a function of age, gender, or social network status. Moreover, differences in subtest performance were not obviously due to grammatical or phonological features of African American English (AAE), but rather to task-related AAE style differences.

Key Words: African American, aphasia, expressive language, assessment, normative data

Submitted on November 8, 2000
Accepted on June 4, 2001

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