What about subtests from Wechsler battery?

Verbal fluency should be very informative. 

Suggestions:  Token Test, Verbal Comprehension Index (WISC or WAIS), Receptive and Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Tests, Halstead Scrrening Test, Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination, Comprehensive Assessment of

Spoken Language (CASL). 

What sort of comprehension are you most interested in? Comprehension at the single word level? Or ability to integrate and exact meaningful information from sentences and other kinds of longer constructions? I ask because these two sets of skills appear to be very different.

From the tags you give (temporal lobe, wernicke area), I'm going for the first one.  The Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Assessment is available in many different languages, and it has a number of different comprehension tests. You can obtain an overall comprehension score, which combines both single word and sentence/passage comprehension. You can also calculate scores for individual tests, and some of these are single word tests (such as picture-pointing tasks). The drawback is the single word tasks are pretty easy (so not very sensitive to mild problems at that level), and you also can't compare the person's score to norms to decide whether its impaired or not.

Ricardo above suggests picture vocabulary tests, and that's a good way to go if you're interested in word comprehension. Tests like the Peabody Picture Word Vocabulary test (where the person hears a word and points to a picture that matches it) are quite sensitive, and norms are available. So you can easily establish whether the person is impaired, even if only mildly. I think the test is available in many languages too.

If you can tell us more about your purpose, I might be able to suggest others that could be better.

The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test would work and does not require a verbal response.

Dear Elisa,

the test you chose may depend on the language you are working with and the population you are assessing. If you were to assess adult Castilian Spanish speakers with Aphasia due to stroke, you could have a look at some of the oral and written comprehension tasks of the Test Barcelona (http://www.test-barcelona.com/es/). At some point soon, there may be a Spanish version of the Comprehensive Aphasia Test, which could be useful to assess this population as well (http://www.aphasiatrials.org/).

Regards,

Adrià

Thank you for all your answers.

Attending to Carolyn, I want to see if some regions of brain are more affected in frailty syndrome than others. For it I'm going to use different cognitive tests associated to different brain areas. I'm looking for a test more associated with temporal lobe than frontal lobe. 

The characteristics of study sample will be: subjects aged 65 or older being Frailty and not dementia.

Regards, 

Hola, la EVALUACIÓN NEUROPSICOLÓGICA BREVE EN ESPAÑOL (N E U R O P S I) tiene una sección especifíca que valora compresión de lenguaje y se puede aplicar en personas hasta los 85 años, también podrías usar test de las fichas de Token test, espero sirva de guía, 

Saludos, Lara

Elisa,

Surprisingly, the language task that is most sensitive to temporal lobe dysfunction is actually picture naming. Really poor scores on picture naming are almost always associated with temporal lobe damage.

You would want to choose a difficult picture naming test, preferably with older age norms. Is there something like that available in Spanish?

Of course, people with damage other areas (Broca's area, left inferior frontal gyrus) can also be poor at picture naming. But temporal lobe cases also exhibit a characteristic error profile - few or no phonemic or articulatory errors, but many semantic errors/omissions. To show that the damage is indeed temporal, I'd recommend administering a picture word vocabulary test too, like we talked about earlier.

Another task that's super sensitive to temporal lobe damage and easy to administer is category fluency (e.g., how many names of animals can you think of?). People with damage to the temporal lobe will perform poorly on this task, more poorly than on the letter fluency task (e.g., how many words beginning with F can you think of?). One of your standard aphasia and neuropsych batteries is sure to have a standarsised version of this test.

I see from your last post that you're doing a study. If so, then I'd definitely go with the trio of tests I've mentioned here, because its easy to find references to support your claim that they are sensitive to left temporal lobe damage. I'd be happy to supply references if you decide to go with this plan.

The token test might not be ideal for your purposes, as its not really tightly associated with the temporal lobe. Patients with inferior parietal damage and anterior damage (e.g., Broca's area) fail on this too. Also, we don't fully understand what cognitive skills the test involves - there is certainly a strong short-term memory component.

How about Wechsler Memory Scales? You might finns one or two interesting subtests here. Paired Associates perhaps the most useful one. You often find lower scores in patients with left-sided temporal lobe injuries.

I also recommend the token test. 

I suggest Token Test to measure specifically comprehension language. If you have interest in others laguage domains you can use the Boston test too

I like the Benton Token's test from the Multilingual Aphasia Examination or MAE as well.

Para el Token Test dispones de baremos españoles con correcciones por edad y nivel de escolaridad (Proyecto Neuronorma)

Benton Tests; token test, repitition, comprehension (tho i feel this is more of a memory test)

WAIS vocab

PPVT