Standardization, Validity and Reliability Study of Gülhane Aphasia Test-2 (GAT-2)

İlknur Maviş; Kemal Colay; Seyhun Topbaş; Oğuz Tanrıdağ

İlknur Maviş¹, Kemal Colay², Seyhun Topbaş¹, Oğuz Tanrıdağ³

¹Dilkom Education, Research And Training Center For Speech And Language Pathology
²Destek İşitme-konuşma Merkezi, İzmir
³Memory Center, Neuro-psychiatry Central, İstanbul, Turkey

Keywords: GAT-2, aphasia screening test in Turkish, standardization, reliability and validity

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: Gülhane Aphasia Test-2 (GAT-2) has been developed to show the presence of a language disorder ‘aphasia’ and to give the clinician implications for the accompanying speech disorders such as apraxia and dysarthria.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of the study was to report standardization, validity and reliability study of GAT-2.

METHODS: : 10 healthy individuals were tested initially for the pilot study. 134 healthy individual was included to the standardization study and 30 individuals with aphasia and 11 individuals with right brain injury was included to the validation study. The inter group GAT-2 score differentiations and the effects of age, years of education, sex variances were observed. GAT-2 cut-off scores were calculated by the scores of healthy individuals. GAT-2 test-retest reliability and inter-observer reliability was calculated.

RESULTS: Healthy individuals’ GAT-2 scores were significantly different from the GAT-2 scores of aphasic patients, but not from right brain injured patients’. Healthy individuals’ GAT-2 scores were not affected from the sex, age variances but from years of education, so cut-off scores were calculated by this variance. GAT-2 scores of aphasic patients were not affected from age, sex and years of education. Test-retest and inter-observer reliability and internal consistency results showed that GAT-2 is a highly reliable aphasia screening test.

CONCLUSION: GAT-2 was found to be a standardized, highly reliable and a valid aphasia test for Turkish stroke patients with aphasia.