ABSTRACT
The Aphasia Screening Test (AST) is a short aphasia battery of receptive and expressive function. This short aphasia battery comprises 20 tests of receptive function and 30 tests of expressive function. Each subtest contains five items that are scored on a pass/fail system, rendering a profile of performance across auditory and reading comprehension, speech production, oral language and writing. As the test relies heavily on visual material, four pre-assessment subtests are designed to screen for marked visual perceptual deficits. Despite its popularity as the most commonly used aphasia battery among UK clinicians, the AST is not theoretically robust, being based largely on the author’s exceptional clinical experience and intuitions. Data obtained from 106 patients on the fifty subtests were subjected to a factor-analysis study. The AST claims to screen impairments at a phonological, syntactic and semantic level, and samples performance at the single letter or sound, word and sentence level.
