A Cantonese version of the Amsterdam-Nijmegen everyday language test (ANELT) : normative data of elderly speakers in Hong Kong

Abstract

Despite the long-standing interests in devising functional communication assessments for English aphasia population, development of Cantonese functional communication measures has only emerged recently. The present study aimed to construct a Cantonese version of the Amsterdam-Nijmegen Everyday Language Test (henceforth, CANELT) with objective quantitative scores to fill the gap of functional communication instrument in the language. The CANELT was performed on 59 neurologically-unimpaired native speakers of Cantonese (41 females) equally stratified into three age groups: 60-69, 70-79, and over 80, following the elicitation procedures in the ANELT. Two scenarios that had never been experienced by at least 15% of the participants were eliminated to uphold the cultural appropriateness of the test. The 20 items were divided into four subsets potentially differing in difficulty level based on the number of informative words (i-words) and their frequency of production, which subsequently facilitated the item reassignment into two parallel versions. The two sets were highly comparable in all three verbal effectiveness indices, with high intra-and inter-rater reliabilities. Statistical results revealed that the oldest participants produced the fewest i-words but with the highest communication efficiency. According to these findings, age-normed performance and two comparable versions of test items of CANELT are developed for further evaluation in clinical settings.