Abstract
Despite the rapid increase of Hispanics in the U.S., there continues to be a lack of adequate psychological assessment tools to examine Spanish-speaking patients with cognitive or neuropsychological disturbances. We investigated the clinical utility of the Multilingual Aphasia Examination-Spanish (MAE-S) in the evaluation of language functions of Hispanic subjects post-traumatic brain injury (TBI). The performance of 40 TBI patients was compared to that of 40 age-, gender-, and education-matched normal controls. Subject groups differed on the Visual Naming (VN), Controlled Oral Word Association (COWA), and Token Test subtests. The VN and COWA subtests were the best discriminators of group membership. Distribution of scores for the patient group on the Rating of Articulation scale additionally indicate subtle articulatory difficulties post-TBI. For all subtests, trauma severity per Glasgow Coma Scale was the best predictor of language performance, over and above the contribution of other clinical and demographic variables. These results are consistent with prior reports of dysphasia post-TBI and suggest that the MAE-S is a sensitive and accurate measure to assess language disturbances in Hispanic populations.