The mt-86 β aphasia battery: A subset of normative data in relation to age and level of school education

Abstract

The MT-86 β version of the Montréal-Toulouse Aphasia Battery has been devised for the clinical assessment of adult French speakers with language disorders. It includes 22 subtests for the appraisal of linguistic abilities in both encoding and decoding oral and written speech. The whole battery has been administered to a total of 143 neurologically healthy adults. This report deals with normative data for seven of the MT-86 β subtests, i.e. repetition, reading aloud, writing to dictation, copy, naming, verbal fluency, word and sentence picture-matching. These subtests correspond to classical tests used in aphasia batteries and are often discussed in the literature in relation to the effect of ageing of linguistic function. Mean scores, standard deviations and score ranges are reported and cut-off scores corresponding to the fifth percentile are suggested. Main effects of both age and education were found to exist in five subtests. Differences indicate better scores among younger versus older adults, and better scores among subjects with a higher versus a lower level of school education. Qualitative analyses of error types are also documented.