This study describes the development of a test battery to assess high-level language function in Swedish and a description of the test performances of a group of 9 individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS). The test battery included tasks such as repetition of long sentences, understanding of complicated logico-grammatical sentences, naming famous people, resolving ambiguities, recreating sentences, understanding metaphors, making inferences, defining words. The MS group included individuals with self-reported language problems as well as individuals without any such problems. Their performances were compared to a group of 7 control subjects with a Kruskal-Wallis one-way ANOVA which indicated significantly different total mean scores. Post hoc analysis with Mann-Whitney U-tests revealed that the group with self-reported language problems had significantly lower mean scores when compared to control subjects and to MS subjects without self-reported language problems. None of the language difficulties were detected by a standard aphasia test.
Cite as: Brunnegaard, K., Laakso, K., Hartelius, L., Ahlsen, E. (1998) Assessing high-level language in individuals with multiple sclerosis: a pilot study. Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998), paper 0496, doi: 10.21437/ICSLP.1998-780
@inproceedings{brunnegaard98_icslp,
author={Karin Brunnegaard and Katja Laakso and Lena Hartelius and Elisabeth Ahlsen},
title={{Assessing high-level language in individuals with multiple sclerosis: a pilot study}},
year=1998,
booktitle={Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998)},
pages={paper 0496},
doi={10.21437/ICSLP.1998-780}
}