Adaptation and normative data for the Comprehensive Aphasia Test in Catalan (CAT-CAT)

Assessment tools for diagnosing aphasia in languages other than English are scarce, particularly for minority languages such as Catalan. The present study introduces the Catalan adaptation of the Comprehensive Aphasia Test (CAT-CAT), the first assessment tool of its kind in Catalan, which was developed with careful consideration of cultural and psycholinguistic factors. Additionally, the study provides normative data based on a sample of 110 Catalan-dominant speakers without language or speech disorders in order to establish the range of non-pathological performance and cut-off scores. We also examined the role of sociodemographic factors on language skills in multilingual speakers of a minority language, a topic often overlooked in the literature. Our findings show that subtests evaluating writing skills in Catalan-speaking individuals are less reliable than those assessing oral abilities, as many Catalan speakers have not received formal instruction in their mother tongue. This factor influences performance more than other variables, such as education level. Notably, language-mixing effects from Spanish were observed mainly in specific production subtests. These findings emphasize the need for language-specific adaptations and, therefore, the value of the CAT-CAT as a tool for both clinical and research purposes in aphasiology.