The Comprehensive Aphasia Test in Catalan (CAT-CAT): preliminary psychometric properties

Abstract

Background Standardized tools for the diagnosis of aphasia are essential for reliable assessment and treatment planning. Most existing tools have been developed for English, leaving minority and understudied languages, such as Catalan, without validated diagnostic instruments.Aims The main goals were to preliminarily evaluate the psychometric properties of the Catalan version of the Comprehensive Aphasia Test (CAT-CAT) and to examine its ability to discriminate between individuals with aphasia and healthy controls.Methods A group of 30 participants with aphasia and 69 age-matched controls were assessed with the CAT-CAT. All participants were Catalan-dominant bilingual speakers. Preliminary analyses of internal consistency, control-referenced C-scores, and group comparisons were conducted to explore the reliability and discriminative capacity of the test.Results The preliminary results showed strong internal consistency in most subtests. PWA performed significantly worse than controls across all domains, except for the written description subtest. Control-referenced C-scores revealed that most participants presented moderate to severe impairments, with the most severe deficits observed in domains such as naming, while the least severe were in written description. These findings are largely consistent with other language adaptations, with the exception of the written description results. This discrepancy is likely due to low literacy in Catalan and suggests that the written description task may be unreliable for participants without formal education in Catalan.Conclusions The CAT-CAT is the first diagnostic tool for Catalan-speaking populations and the first CAT adaptation specifically developed for a predominantly bilingual context. It constitutes an important step toward future research on Catalan aphasia and contributes to the cross-linguistic study of aphasia in bilingual and minoritized language contexts.