Test MetAphAs. Metalinguagem na Avaliação da Afasia

Test MetAphAs. Metalinguagem na Avaliação da Afasia (Rosell-Clari & Hernández-Sacristán, 2020) is an adapted to Portuguese and abbreviated version of Rosell Clari & Hernández Sacristán, 2014). This test was initially developed to evaluate natural metalinguistic skills in persons with aphasia (Hernández-Sacristán, Rosell-Clari, Serra-Alegre & Quiles-Climent, 2012). Natural metalinguistic skills refer to language use that reveals reflexivity (Hockett, 1960); that is, the speaker’s perceptive distance with respect to her/his own verbal behavior (Werner & Kaplan, 1978). Such language self-awareness allows us to monitor our own communication behaviors and, in turn, be able to plan it, inhibit it, and adapt it to different contexts of language use. In this sense, the test examines a cognitive domain of interrelation between executive functioning and verbal behavior. MetAphAs has been validated with 30 Spanish-speaking aphasic individuals and has demonstrated its sensitivity to both severity and type of aphasia. More recently, it has also shown its sensitivity to the study of verbal behavior in persons with dementia, particularly the severity and the types of dementia (Alzheimer's disease, frontotemporal dementia in the behavioral variant, and primary progressive aphasia). The test is made up of 40 items, ranked on a 0-4 Likert scale. The 40 items are grouped in the following sections: Section I: Inner language, capacity to inhibit and defer speech (6 items) Section II: Control of concurrent semiotic procedures (discursive markers, phonic and kinesic gesture) (5 items) Section III: Paraphrastic skills and associated phenomena (5 items) Section IV: Referred speech and associated phenomena (4 items) Section V: Monitoring abilities and contextualization cues (10 items) Section VI: Displaced uses of language and theory of mind (10 items) The Portuguese version of the MetAphAs test is available in Google books (Rosell-Clari, & Hernández-Sacristán, 2020).