The goal of the present study is to present the adaptation of the Catalan version of the Comprehensive Aphasia Test (CAT; Swinburn et al., 2005; Howard et al., 2010) and the preliminary results of the ongoing standardization process from 43 healthy participants (age range: 20-80 years old; 27 women; 40 right-handed and 3 left-handed) and 9 people with different subtypes of aphasia and etiologies (age range: 45-78 years old, 6 women, all right-handed, time post-onset: 5-11 years). The test consists of 6 cognitive tasks to evaluate the possibility of associated cognitive deficits, such as apraxia or acalculia, and 21 tasks with the purpose to assess the following linguistic behaviors: comprehension, production, repetition, naming, reading and writing.

The descriptive results showed that the performance of healthy individuals on the cognitive and linguistic parts was at ceiling. The performance of aphasic subjects on the cognitive tasks was slightly better than their performance on the linguistic tasks, but worse than the healthy subjects’ performance (specially on the verbal fluency and recognition memory tasks). Regarding the linguistic evaluation, meaningful differences could be observed between the performance of both groups on different tasks, more specifically, on the subtests that assess the comprehension of sentences, the verbal digit span, the repetition of sentences, the ability to name objects both orally and in writing, the written and oral description of a picture, and those that involved reading and repeating pseudowords.

The preliminary results suggest that the CAT-CAT was sensitive to the linguistic deficit of the Catalan-speaking aphasic subjects that participated in the study and, hence, that it can be a useful tool to assess their language skills in their native language. We are now broadening our sample to conduct the statistical analysis to determine its reliability as a diagnostic tool.