Abstract

MARTINEZ-CUITINO, Macarena; BARREYRO, Juan Pablo  and  JAICHENCO, Virginia. Spanish adaptation and validation of a semantic assessment tool: the 64 Semantic Battery. Neuropsicologia Latinoamericana [online]. 2009, vol.1, n.1, pp. 24-31. ISSN 2075-9479.

Semantic memory is a long term memory system proposed by Tulving (2000) that stores objects, words, concepts and general world knowledge's meanings. A semantic disorder should be assessed through different modalities (verbal - visual - pictorial, etc.) and a concept should be activated from different outputs (naming, matching, etc.). The aim of this work is to present the 64 Semantic Battery's adaptation and validation to our cultural and linguistic context. The battery includes six tasks that allowed assessing the same 64 concepts. The test was administered to 50 controls, 10 semantic dementia patients, and 5 aphasic patients. All tasks showed good reliability indexes and the patient's performance was statistically different from that of controls. Moreover, the two groups of patients differed significantly in all the tasks. Semantic dementia patients show a better performance than aphasic patients in oral reading and writing to dictation. Aphasic patients have a better performance in the remaining tasks. These differences between both groups of patients could be explained by the transparency of the Spanish orthography. This indicates that our Spanish version is an adequate instrument to assess semantic memory and a reliable battery for the diagnostic of acquired semantic disorders, and allows to differentiate deficits of input and output modalities from central semantic ones.

Keywords : Semantic memory; Semantic battery; Semantic disorders; Memory disorders; Aphasia.

        · abstract in Spanish | Portuguese | French     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )