Turkish Adaptation of The Assessment of Pragmatic Abilities and Cognitive Substrates (APACS): Pilot Study

Pragmatic abilities are fundamental in communication and to go beyond what the speaker literally says. However, such abilities are subject to decay with age or impaired after acquired or degenerative disorders. It thus appears essential to develop tools for the evaluation of pragmatic abilities across languages and cultures. The Assessment of Pragmatic Abilities and Cognitive Substrates (APACS) test (Arcara & Bambini, 2016) is one of the instruments assessing pragmatic abilities in clinical and non-clinical populations. However, this tool is not available in Turkish. The main purpose of this study was to adapt the APACS test into Turkish and to conduct a pilot study on healthy individuals, to support the cross-cultural use of this standardized tool. Following the original version, the Turkish adaptation included six tasks, namely Interview, Description, Narratives, Figurative Language 1, Humor, and Figurative Langue 2, as well as three composite scores, namely Pragmatic Production, Pragmatic Comprehension, and APACS Total score. In line with the normative study in Italian, we tested the Turkish adaptation in a sample of healthy adults (N = 30), with different age and education characteristics. We analyzed their overall performance, potential difficulties of single tasks, and correlated their performance with demographic elements and linguistic (vocabulary) and socio-communicative abilities (Autism Quotient). We hypothesized that the healthy participants would score very high in the three composite scores (Pragmatic Productions, Pragmatic Comprehension, APACS Total). In line with the hypothesis, the means of three composite scores of participants were very high (composite production=.97, composite comprehension= .91 APACS total= .94), similarly to the Italian norms. Analyses also highlighted correlations between (i) age and education and the Narratives task, and (ii) vocabulary score and Figurative Language 1, as well as vocabulary score and Pragmatic Comprehension composite score. There was no significant relationship between Autism Quotient and APACS scores. Overall, the results of the adaptation study were promising, with high scores and various correlations. This work represents the first adaptation study of a pragmatic assessment tool for the Turkish clinical population and can pave the way to future norming studies. The analyses here included might also help shape further changes towards more refined forms of the APACS Turkish.

The author of the current thesis cannot speak Italian