Adaptation of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT) to Sardinian: Clinical and social implications

The Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT) was developed between 1976 and 1982. At present, it has been adapted to over 60 languages and 150 language pairs. Its main function is to assess and compare the residual linguistic abilities in each language of an aphasic patient. The BAT is not only used for bilingual aphasia assessment, but also for the evaluation of the effects of treatment as well as for the assessment of language disorders in bilinguals and monolinguals. Furthermore, it is also used for research in psycholinguistics experiments and in combination with modern neuroimaging and neurophysiological techniques. This article describes the adaptation of the BAT to the Sardinian variety of Logudorese and in particular to the sub-variety spoken in the town of Bitti (central Logudorese). To our knowledge, this is the first adaptation of the Bilingual Aphasia Test to Sardinian. At the moment, there are no published aphasia tests in Sardinian, and for this reason this adaptation provides the first standardized test for assessment in this language.