Western Aphasia Battery

The Western Aphasia Battery or WAB is an instrument for assessing the language function of adults, able to discern the presence, degree, and type of aphasia. Another such test is the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination. The aphasia quotient (AQ) is the summary score that indicates overall severity of language impairment.

The WAB–R, a full battery of 8 subtests (32 short tasks), maintains the structure and overall content and clinical value of the current measure while creating these improvements:

• Two new supplementary tasks (reading and writing of irregular and non-words) will aid the clinician in distinguishing between surface, deep (phonological), and visual dyslexia.
• Revision of approximately 15 items
• Bedside WAB–R – provides a quick look at patient’s functioning
• Examiner’s manual with technical/psychometric properties information, test interpretation relevant to aphasic populations, historical evidence of reliability and validity, and information about the unique aspects of assessing the language ability of individuals with dementia
• Spiral-bound stimulus book replacing loose stimulus cards
• Revised administration directions – more user-friendly with directions to the examinee for all subtests
• Expanded scoring guidelines for clarity

Scoring

Criterion cut scores:

• Aphasia Quotient
• Cortical Quotient
• Auditory Comprehension Quotient
• Oral Expression Quotient
• Reading Quotient
• Writing Quotient
• Bedside WAB–R scores

The Western Aphasia Battery (Shewan & Kertesz, 1980) was designed to provide a means of evaluating the major clinical aspects of language function: content, fluency, auditory comprehension, repetition and naming plus reading, writing and calculation. In addition to the nonverbal skills of drawing, block design and praxis are evaluated and Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices test is usually administered as well. The scoring provides two main totals, in addition to the subscale scores. These are the Aphasia Quotient (AQ) score and Cortical Quotient (CQ) score. AQ can essentially be thought of as a measure of language ability, whilst CQ is a more general measure of intellectual ability and includes all the subscales. Administration of the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) yields a total score termed the Aphasia Quotient (AQ), which is said to reflect the severity of the spoken language deficit in aphasia. This score is a weighted composite of performance on 10 separate WAB subtests.