A rapid assessment of pragmatic abilities and cognitive substrates: the German APACS Brief

Abstract

BackgroundClinical evaluation of language abilities is central to diagnosing impairments in neurological and neuropsychiatric conditions, such as brain injuries, Parkinson’s disease, or schizophrenia. However, assessment tools predominantly target formal structural aspects of language, including phonological, lexical-semantic, and syntactic processing, while pragmatic and communicative abilities remain underrepresented, despite consistent evidence of their vulnerability across clinical populations. This gap is largely due to the scarcity of standardized and rapid tools for pragmatic assessment and the inherent difficulty of measuring context-dependent communicative abilities.AimThis study aimed to develop and validate the German adaptation of the Assessment of Pragmatic Abilities and Cognitive Substrates Brief (APACS Brief-De), a 10-minute screening tool originally created in Italian, assessing discourse production and comprehension of figurative language (metaphor and humor) in German-speaking contexts, to evaluate the psychometric properties, usability, and cross-linguistic applicability of the instrument.MethodsAdopting a culturally sensitive translation approach, a standard and a multiple-choice APACS Brief-De were developed, each with an alternate form to allow for repeated assessments, which were administered remotely to healthy German-speaking adults.ResultsThe APACS Brief-De Multiple Choice showed good consistency, reliability, validity, and equivalence between forms. Increasing age and lower global cognitive functioning were significantly associated with reduced pragmatic performance. The comparisons with the Italian standard form confirmed statistical equivalence, underscoring the robustness of the tool across languages. Age- and education-adjusted normative cut-off scores are provided for clinical interpretation.ConclusionsAPACS Brief-De offers a rapid and valid tool for assessing global pragmatic abilities, well suited for integration into routine clinical practice, and represents a significant step toward crosslinguistic standardization of pragmatic assessment.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Aphasiology, 2026 · DOI ↗