Taiwanese Normative Study in Healthy Adult Population: Norms for the MAE Verbal Comprehension Tests

• Main Authors: Tak-Man Chiang, 鄭德雯
• Other Authors: 花茂棽
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/75686519201210884806

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 心理學研究所 === 104 === Background: Patients with verbal comprehension disturbances are common in clinical practice. The MAE Verbal Comprehension Tests are widely used tasks for measuring semantic and syntactic comprehension. Moreover, these tests were convenient to use, short administration time, and easy to administrate. However, there is currently a lack of representative normative data for the MAE Verbal Comprehension Tests in the Taiwanese population. Objective: The present study aimed to obtain normative data for the MAE Verbal Comprehension Tests. The specific objectives were as follows: (1) to assess influences of demographic variables on the performances on the tests, (2) to establish psychometric properties, and (3) to determine norm appropriacy. Methods: Three hundred and twenty five participants were recruited through stratified sampling by current age (ranging from 16 to 90 years old), education (ranging from 0 to 19 years), and area of residence. Thirty participants additionally completed the Vocabulary, the Similarities, the Information, the Arithmetic, and the Digit Span subtests of the WAIS-III to investigate the validity. Test-retest reliability was derived from a subgroup of thirty participants. Results: Education and Age effects were significant on most of the MAE Verbal Comprehension Tests, while a small gender effect was only showed on the Reading Comprehension subtest. The results also showed adequate test-retest reliability, criterion-related validity, and construct validity for the MAE Verbal Comprehension Tests. The normative data showed good representativeness, recency, and relevance. Conclusion: The present study determined the influences of demographic effects on the MAE Verbal Comprehension Tests, established appropriate normative data for evaluating semantic and syntactic comprehension, and provided a referential table for percentile ranks.