BEPS: Development, validation, and normative data of a sentence production test in French

Assessing one's sentence production ability can help to identify difficulties experienced by individuals with aphasia and enables targeted intervention. Speech-language pathologists working with the francophone population must contend with the current lack of a sentence production evaluation tool. The aim of this article is to present the development, validation, and normative data of a French-language test used to evaluate the production of sentences: the BEPS (Batterie d'Évaluation de la Production Syntaxique). The BEPS includes four tasks based on Bock and Levelt's model of sentence production, namely (1) Verb Naming Task, (2) Verb Inflection Task, (3) Constituent Assembly Task, and (4) Thematic Role Assignment Task. For each task, various psycholinguistic parameters were controlled or manipulated. The BEPS had good content and construct validity, excellent test-retest reliability and good internal consistency. This battery fulfills the current needs for clinical tool in the francophone population when assessing sentence production capacities. Normative data are presented for individuals 19-79 years of age (n = 191). Raw scores were converted to percentiles for each task. The BEPS represents significant assistance to help clinicians identify the origins of the syntactic production deficits of patients with poststroke and degenerative diseases.