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Purpose: The absence of culture- and language-specific aphasia assessment in Bangla underscores a critical problem in communication sciences and disorders. Aphasia occurs in ~41% of Bangla-speaking stroke survivors. In the past 40 years, stroke incidence has doubled in low- and middle-income countries, such as Bangladesh and India, where there are ~250 million native Bangla speakers. This study aims to initiate the first step toward identifying an appropriate picture stimulus for the Bangla picture description task (PDT) intended for inclusion in a Bangla aphasia assessment. Researchers have reported the importance of cultural relevance and three visuographic variables of a picture (high-context, color, and photograph vs. black-and-white line drawing) for faster comprehension and comprehensive language production in people with aphasia and neurologically healthy adults. Method: Ninety-six neurologically healthy native Bangla speakers of three age groups (young 19–30, middle age 40–55, and older 65–89 years) were recruited to compare spontaneous language production for four selected culturally related and nonrelated picture stimuli with and without the three visuographic variables. Five linguistic variables were used to analyze the language samples. Results: The results demonstrated a significant (a) picture type effect for moving-average type–token ratio, words per minute (WPM), and mean length of utterance in morphemes (MLU) and (b) age group effect for WPM, MLU, and complexity index. Conclusions: This study suggests that a culturally related high-context color photograph is the optimal choice for the Bangla PDT. This study also indicates reduced fluency, grammatical complexity, and syntactic complexity in healthy Bangla-speaking adults aged 65 years and above. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: A comprehensive aphasia assessment is necessary to diagnose the type and severity of aphasia differentially and guide appropriate interventions. One component of an aphasia assessment is the picture description task (PDT), designed to probe spontaneous speech fluency and information content. Most aphasia assessments use black‐and‐white line drawings (LD) to elicit spontaneous language samples from people with aphasia (PWA). However, recent studies reported two visuographic variables: (1) colour (over black and white) and (2) photograph (over LD), that tended to encourage easier and faster comprehension and increased overall naturalistic language production from neurologically healthy individuals as well as PWA. Additionally, a suitable stimulus for a PDT should always be culturally relevant to the target population. Therefore, we suggest that a new PDT must include a culturally appropriate colour photograph (CP). Aims: To investigate if a culturally appropriate CP elicits longer and more complex utterances than a culturally appropriate black‐and‐white LD from neurologically healthy native Bangla speakers. Methods & Procedures: A total of 30 participants (mean age = 36.03 years) were recruited based on self‐reports of no known impairments in cognition, language, vision and hearing. All were of middle socioeconomic status with at least 12 years of formal education. A culturally appropriate CP was selected showing multiple characters performing various functions. Later, an artist prepared the black‐and‐white LD of that CP. The elicited language samples using these two pictures were transcribed and coded following preset transcription and coding guidelines. The transcribed samples were further analysed using the Bangla adaptation of Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) software. To identify the differences in language production between these two picture types, investigators used four measurement variables: mean length of utterances (MLU), complexity index (CI), total number of words (TNW) and words per minute (WPM). Outcomes & Results: Of the four measures, only MLU showed a statistically significant difference between the CP and the black‐and‐white LD. CI demonstrated a strong correlation with MLU for the CP, which indicates that the participants who produced higher MLU for the CP also produced a higher CI for the CP. There were no significant differences between the two picture types for CI, TNW and WPM. Conclusions & Implications: This study found that the grammatical complexity, as measured by MLU, of spontaneous language production of neurologically healthy adults was higher when a CP was used in a PDT. A CP may also be beneficial for PWA to produce complex language samples. What this paper addsWhat is already known on the subjectThere are studies on neurologically healthy individuals as well as on PWA that identified the impact of using different visuographic variables (colour and photograph) separately, which enhanced the picture comprehension and improved performances on associated language production tasks. To our knowledge, no studies have identified the combined impact of these two visuographic variables on spontaneous language production. Therefore, this initial study on neurologically healthy Bangla adults reports the impact of using a CP as a stimulus item for a PDT task to elicit spontaneous language samples.What this paper adds to existing knowledgeThis study reports that using a culturally appropriate CP for a PDT enhances the grammatical complexity of spontaneous language production of neurologically healthy adults. To our knowledge, this is the first study in Bangla that used the MLU as a measurement variable to analyse adults' spontaneous language production.What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work?The development of future aphasia assessments should consider incorporating CPs as stimuli for PDTs, which may guide speech–language pathologists to provide accurate diagnoses for aphasia and related language disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: We sought to examine interrater reliability in clinical assessment of apraxia of speech (AOS) in individuals with primary progressive aphasia and to identify speech characteristics predictive of AOS diagnosis. Method: Fifty-two individuals with primary progressive aphasia were recorded performing a variety of speech tasks. These recordings were viewed by 2 experienced speechlanguage pathologists, who independently rated them on the presence and severity of AOS as well as 14 associated speech characteristics. We calculated interrater reliability (percent agreement and Cohen’s kappa) for these ratings. For each rater, we used stepwise regression to identify speech characteristics significantly predictive of AOS diagnosis. We used the overlap between raters to create a more parsimonious model, which we evaluated with multiple linear regression. Results: Results yielded high agreement on the presence (90%) and severity of AOS (weighted Cohen’s κ = .834) but lower agreement for specific speech characteristics (weighted Cohen’s κ ranging from .036 to .582). Stepwise regression identified 2 speech characteristics predictive of AOS diagnosis for both raters (articulatory groping and increased errors with increased length/complexity). These alone accounted for ≥ 50% of the variance of AOS severity in the constrained model. Conclusions: Our study adds to a growing body of research that highlights the difficulty in objective clinical characterization of AOS and perceptual characterization of speech features. It further supports the need for consensus diagnostic criteria with standardized testing tools and for the identification and validation of objective markers of AOS. Additionally, these findings underscore the need for a training protocol if diagnostic tools are to be effective when shared beyond the research teams that develop and test them and disseminated to practicing speech-language pathologists, in order to ensure consistent application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]