Lothian Assessment for Screening Cognition in Aphasia (LASCA): A New Non Verbal Assessment of Cognition

Abstract

Post stroke aphasia often results in cognitive dysfunction affecting the daily functioning of patients. At present there are no well established screening measures for evaluating the cognitive problems associated with aphasia. Vast Majority of the cognitive measures used in clinical settings are based on verbal language, which is affected in aphasia. Lothian Assessment for screening cognition in Aphasia (LASCA) is a newly developed non linguistic measure established by the Speech, Language, Occupational Therapists and Clinical Neuropsychologists of Lothian. The study aims to investigate a sample of healthy elderly people (N=70, Age = 50-92, M=68.23, SD=8.95) by adding previous sample (N=35) of Warren (2011) into the current sample (N=35) thus computing a combined analysis, comparing the efficacy of LASCA with commonly used ACER by calculating the convergent validity. In comparison to Warren (2011) the current study showed significant moderate correlations for all the subsets of LASCA and ACE-R except Attention/Orientation. Relationships of demographic variables like age, education, gender and pre-morbid intelligence with LASCA performance were also computed. Results indicated that performance of LASCA was significantly related with the age, level of education and pre-morbid intelligence of participants. Non significant gender differences were seen in the performance of LASCA. The study for the first time investigated the reliability and validity of LASCA. Although the results did not show very high estimates of Cronbach alpha due to variability of subscales in LASCA . The implications of results are discussed in the study.