Assessing high-level language in individuals with multiple sclerosis: a pilot study

This study describes the development of a test battery to assess high-level language functions in Swedish and also the test performances of a group of nine individuals with multiple sclerosis. The test battery included tasks such as repetition of long sentences, understanding of complicated logico-g rammatical sentences, naming famous people, resolving ambiguities, recreati ng sentences, understanding metaphors, making inferences, and defining word s. The multiple sclerosis group included individuals with self-reported lan guage problems as well as individuals without any such problems. The perfor mances of these two subgroups were compared to that of a group of seven con trol subjects using a Kruskal-Wallis one-way ANOVA. Post hoc analysis with Mann-Whitney U-tests revealed that the group with self-reported language pr oblems had significantly lower mean scores when compared to control subject s and to multiple sclerosis subjects without self-reported language problem s. None of the language difficulties were detected by a standard aphasia te st.