The assessment of cognitive skills of individuals with and without aphasia using adaptation of cognitive screening part of the comprehensive aphasia test

The questions of how language and cognition affect each other, of how and to what extent cognitive skills of individuals with aphasia are impaired are controversial. Thus, neuropsychological and cognitive screening tests designed for aphasic individuals are rather limited and there are mixed opinions about their contents. The aim of this study is (i) to contribute the literature on the relationship between language and cognition; (ii) to provide descriptive and comparative analyses about this relation based on test results of Turkish speaking individuals with and without aphasia; (iii) to offer a preliminary study for the Cognitive Screening part of Comprehensive Aphasia Test (CAT), which is currently being adapted to Turkish. Cognitive skills of 14 individuals with aphasia and 14 non-brain-damaged individuals, aged between 21 and 76 years, living in Eskişehir were tested and the sensitivity of Cognitive Screening test to inconsistent cognitive abilities of participants was examined. Aphasic individuals were divided into three groups using according to aphasia severity: Primary, Secondary and Executive Functional Disorder Findings in this study showed that the aphasia groups achieved the highest scores in the Semantic Memory and Recognition Memory sub-tests, which do not require motor planning and verbal production. A correlation between the results of Cognitive Screening and the Language Assessment Test for Aphasia (ADD) also shows that there is a relationship between linguistic and the cognitive skills. While both impact and impaired language competences may impact on individuals' cognitive abilities, impairments in attention, executive functions, and memory would also affect language skills, as language and cognitive functions are thought to have shared neural representations. The idea of language not being a solitary but one of the five domains of cognition and cannot be separated from the whole is supported. Assessment of related cognitive skills prior to a language test can provide healthy basis for the intervention method. The CAT provides a useful screening tool for both clinicians and aphasic individuals in order to assess cognitive skills in the shortest possible and most useful way.