Abstract:
The Multilingual Aphasia Examination (MAE) is a test battery used to diagnose the presence of aphasic disorders and evaluate their severity and type. It contains eleven subtests: visual naming (using a 10-picture flip chart), sentence repetition, word association, oral spelling, written spelling, block spelling (using plastic letters), MAE token test (using colored plastic shapes of various sizes), aural comprehension of words and phrases, reading comprehension of words and phrases, rating of articulation, and rating of praxic features of writing. Norms were established by testing 360 adults from 16 to 69 years of age whose native language was English and who had no history of hemispheric brain disease. The performance of 48 patients with aphasic disorders was used to calibrate five of the subtests which measure the degree of the disorder. 229 children from grades K-6 with normal intelligence and no history of psychiatric disorder provided norms against which the performance of child examinees could be measured. The MAE has been translated into French and German, but without norms for native speakers of those languages. A normed version is available in Spanish. The subtests are administered one-on-one and include score sheets on which examinee responses are recorded and totaled. All of the information necessary for interpreting obtained scores is present in the Manual of Instructions. Percentiles, mean scores by grade level, and a separate subset of the norms obtained from elderly examinees are provided.