Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination

The Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination or BDAE is a neuropsychological battery used to evaluate adults suspected of having aphasia, and is currently in its third edition. It was created by Harold Goodglass and Edith Kaplan. The BDAE evaluates language skills based on perceptual modalities (auditory, visual, and gestural), processing functions (comprehension, analysis, problem-solving), and response modalities (writing, articulation, and manipulation). Administration time ranges from 20 to 45 minutes for the shortened version but it can last up to 120 minutes for the extended version of the assessment. There are five subtests which include: conversational & expository speech, auditory comprehension, oral expression, reading, and writing. In the extended version all questions are asked while in the shortened version only a few questions are asked within each subtest. Many other tests are sometimes used by neurologists and speech language pathologists on a case-by-case basis, and other comprehensive tests exist like the Western Aphasia Battery.

The Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE-3) provides a comprehensive exploration of a range of communicative abilities. The results of the BDAE are used to classify patient's language profiles into one of the localization based classifications of aphasia: Broca's, Wernicke's, anomic, conduction, transcortical, transcortical motor, transcortical sensory, and global aphasia syndromes, although the test does not always provide a diagnosis or a therapeutic approach. The assessment does provide you with a severity rating. The Examination is designed to go beyond simple functional definitions of aphasia into the components of language dysfunctions (symptoms) that have been shown to underlie the various aphasic syndromes. Thus, this test evaluates various perceptual modalities (e.g., auditory, visual, and gestural), processing functions (e.g., comprehension, analysis, problem-solving), and response modalities (e.g., writing, articulation, and manipulation). This approach allows for the neuropsychological analysis and measurement of language-related skills and abilities from both ideographic and nomothetic bases, as well as a comprehensive approach to the symptom configurations that relate to neuropathologic conditions. The test is divided into five subtests and include assessment of conversation and expository speech (simple social responses, free conversation, and picture description), auditory comprehension (at the word-level, sentence level, and complex ideational material), oral expression (automatized sequences, repetition, and naming) , reading (basic symbol recognition, number matching, word identification-picture-word matching, oral reading, and reading comprehension), and writing (mechanics, encoding skills, written picture naming, and narrative writing).

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