| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立台北護理學院 === 聽語障礙科學研究所 === 93 === The current trend of rehabilitative assessment is to evaluate the treatment efficacy in a functional approach. For aphasia, functional communication ability has been an important index for evaluation of the treatment efficacy of speech therapy. Numerous assessment tools for functional communication have been developed and widely used in western countries. However, it is still lacking in Taiwan. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to adapt the popular “Functional Assessment of Communication Skill for Adults” by the American Speech-Language Hearing Association (ASHA) into a Chinese version for the assessment of aphasic patients, and also to examine its applicability and preliminary reliability and validity. 30 patients with aphasia of various severities and 25 normal controls with matched age and educational levels were recruited. All subjects received assessment of functional communication with the adapted test. The aphasic patients were also tested on the Chinese version of Western Aphasia Battery to assess the severity of their language impairments. The results showed that the aphasic patients had significantly lower scores than the normal controls in both the communication independence and the qualitative dimensions. The functional communication ability was correlated with the severity of aphasia impairment in general, but most patients attained a higher score in the communication of basic needs. The test has a high internal consistency (αvalue above .88) and a high inter-rater consistency (αvalue above .73) in the communication independence, but there were more variations in the qualitative dimension scores among different raters. There were several items with high missing data rate especially in the patients with more severe aphasia, which might reflect the differences of communication needs between aphasic patients and normal subjects. Overall, the test can be used to assess the functional communication ability for aphasic patients in Taiwan. However, further training of raters is necessary to improve the inter-rater reliability.
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