I'm looking for a neuropsychological assessment focused on everyday language, which includes pragmatic, interpretation, inference and so on. The aim is to apply it in all kinds of injured brains, like aphasia, Alzheimer, TBI etc. Any ideas?
Just worried about the literacy side. In Brazil we have lots of illetrate and poorly schooled people - I know it sounds weird, but Im not sure if everybody knows what a circle or a square is and we dont want to mess it up language dificulties and literacy dificulties.
For the oral part , for example, we've been using MAC. It has questions like: "This kid is a popcorn - what does it mean?" and "Boy ang girl are leaving the grocery store, both of them are carrying bags. The girl says: my bag is really heavy - what does she really mean?" (in this case, because the focus is on oral language, we read everything for them). So thats kinda reading/writing test Im looking for now, I hope Token Test can help us in some way, Ill definitely check this out ;). Thank you again.
IMHO, this is very difficult to objectively evaluate; there are certainly a number of language tests that claim to measure aspects of everyday language. However, "everyday language" is spontaneous; the subject must "structure" the communication on his/her own; all tests add an element of structure which can easily interfere with identification and measurement of everyday language communication; obviously, there are clearly numerous other factors that can complicate the matter, some of which have already been mentioned in other answers. Anyway, I also believe it is critically important to conceptualize "language" from a neuroanatomic model; see Ullman and colleagues for numerous papers describing the Declarative-Procedural model of language function, describing a dual-tiered neurobiologically situated model dependent upon cortical-basal ganglia interactions; this model might help guide the way in establishing a framework for your question.