The standardization of a Uighur Aphasia battery

Abstract

Objective To study the reliability and validity of an aphasia battery of Uighur (ABU). Methods The Chinese Aphasia Battery (ABC) was translated into Uighur. Appropriate adaptation was made according to the features of Uyghur language, but the overall structure was unchanged. Three rounds of comments and revisions were conducted by experts and the ABU was back-translated into Chinese after language adjustment and pretesting. The ABU was then applied to evaluating 104 cases of stroke aphasia among Uighur speakers, among which 30 cases were retested one week later. The construct validity, internal reliability, retest reliability and split-half reliability of the scale were tested using factor analysis and Spearman rank correlation analysis. Results The discrepancy between the original and back-translated ABC was less than 10%. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin value was 0.917 and the p value of the Bartlett's test for sphericity was ≤0.005. Three common factors were extracted using principal component analysis with a varimax orthogonal rotation: a writing factor; and a listening comprehension factor. Together they explained a total of 81% of the variance. The Cronbach's α of the components were 0.969 for oral expression, 0.922 for listening comprehension, 0.966 for reading and 0.924 for writing, giving a total α coefficient of 0.978. The test-retest correlation coefficients of 22 items were greater than 0.8, with only another two below 0.7. The split-half reliability of the scale was 0.906. Conclusions The aphasia battery in Uighur has good validity and reliability, and can quantitatively reflect the functional status and language changes among Uighur's with stroke aphasia. It may also be suitable for application in the clinical rehabilitation of other sorts of Uighur-speaking aphasics. Key words: Uyghur language; Aphasia test; Reliability; Validity