Adaptation of the Quick Aphasia Battery into Italian: an interdisciplinary and international collaboration

Background Italian is among the world’s most widely spoken languages, with over 63 million speakers including both residents of Italy and the global Italian diaspora, including over half a million in the United States who speak Italian at home. Moreover, it is among the most studied as a second language. As such, it may be encountered in healthcare settings as a language spoken by patients with neurogenic communication disorders, not only in Italy but also internationally wherever communities of Italian speakers exist.Aims Responding to the need for psycholinguistically informed, user-friendly, convenient, and practical aphasia screening tests across the world’s languages, the English-language Quick Aphasia Battery (QAB) was adapted into Standard Italian as the Test Rapido di Valutazione dell’Afasia (Italian QAB) thanks to an interdisciplinary, inter-institutional, and international collaboration of scholars of language and aphasia.Methods and Procedures The Italian QAB was adapted into Standard Italian by a collaborative team, including a native Italian-speaking linguist, neuropsychologist, and speech-language pathologist, a speech-language pathology student in training who had learned Italian as a second language, and a cognitive neuroscientist of language and cross-linguistic aphasia. To ensure cultural and linguistic appropriateness of test instructions, stimuli, and targets while maintaining the original QAB’s psycholinguistic strengths, the team agreed upon linguistic decision points via collaborative deliberation and consensus.Outcomes and Results The resulting Italian QAB adaptation can serve as an efficient tool for clinicians and researchers working with Italian-speaking individuals with aphasia. Moreover, adaptation of the Italian QAB offered a unique opportunity to address contemporary issues of linguistic equity and language barriers in healthcare, best practices for evaluation and treatment of multilingual patients with aphasia, the advantages and limitations of artificial intelligence in production of cross-linguistic materials, and the need for creation of accessible materials for cases of aphasia in understudied and minority languages in addition to well-studied and globally dominant languages like Italian.Conclusions The interdisciplinary and international collaboration that adapted the Italian QAB can serve as a model for creation of freely and publicly accessible cross-linguistic adaptations of aphasia screening tests. Because it is published under the Creative Commons Attribution License on the website of the Language Neuroscience Laboratory led by the creator of the original QAB Stephen Wilson, it is freely and publicly accessible to clinicians and researchers serving Italian-speaking patients around the world for clinical applications, norming, reliability testing and validation.