Development of Bedside Aphasia Battery in Tamil (BAB-T)

Bedside Aphasia Battery in Tamil (BAB-T) was developed for assessing the linguistic abilities of Tamil-speaking individuals following an acquired brain injury.

The conception of the test took place in two phases: Phase 1 was the development of the Bedside Aphasia Battery in Tamil (BAB-T) and phase 2 administration of the test battery in neurotypical adults and patients with aphasia. A Delphi panel was constructed based on selected experts from the field of neuro-communication disorders and linguistics majors in the Tamil language. Recruited participants were surveyed using a modified Delphi method to establish opinions. A three-round Delphi process-derived consensus among the experts regarding the components and subdomains employed in the construction of BAB in Tamil. A pilot study was also conducted on nine participants (six neurotypical and three patients with stroke) to content validate the constructed BAB in Tamil.

BAB-T and its subdomains were identified to have excellent internal consistency, test retest and interrater reliability. BAB-T takes approximately 15-20 min to administer and can be employed in busy wards. This tool is especially useful in low-resource countries like India, where professional specialized speech and language services are scarce. The BAB-T significantly differentiates performance between neurotypical adults and patients with aphasia. Additionally, differences among the patient group also reflect the type of fluent and non-fluent aphasia.