British Sign Language Cognitive Screening Test
Introduction
The British Sign Language Cognitive Screening Test is a screening tool for assessing cognition designed wholly in British Sign Language, to help detect dementia and acquired cognitive impairment in older deaf adults. It can be used to detect neurodegeneration, or as a clinical baseline for future comparison.
It is designed to screen all areas of cognition, with items relating to memory, language, executive function, visuospatial ability, orientation and attention. This test is used to assess acquired congntive problems only.
Administration
The BSL congnitive screening test is a clinician operated test with standarised items and video instructions present through video to the respondent in Sign langiage. This test takes up to 30 to 45 minutes.
population
older deaf adults aged between 50-89 years concerning changes in cognition.
Younger deaf adults.
Not used
this test cannot be used for to mesure cognition in deaf adults with developmental and learning disabilities..
Test Procedure
It is designed for administration in clinical and community settings, with questions and instructions presented in BSL video format on a laptop and taking 30– 45 min to complete. The respondent views the video and signs his/her response to each test item. The investigator is present during testing and records responses on the score sheet. Clarification is provided where instructions are not understood and video clips may be repeated. Test sessions are video recorded to enable scoring to be double checked
evidence
previous research reported the unreliability of using an interpreter for cognitive evaluation due to language and cultural differences between deaf signers and hearing oral speakers (Hill-Briggs et al., 2007; Dean et al., 2009).
According to Atkinson et al. (2015), the assessment tools to evaluate cognitive deficits of older adult deaf signers should be designed in sign language.
these tests measure verbal language ability and verbal memory, with scores referenced against norms from the general population; these domains are known to be weak in the cognitive profiles of prelingually deaf people and will inevitably lack validity for deaf people (see Baker & Baker, 2011 f
Mini mental State Exaination(MMSE), the Addenbrookes Cognitive Examination Revised (ACE-R) and Montreal Cogniive Assessment (MoCA) donot tranlate effectively to sign language.
Deaf people have poor literacy which is whhy we dont use writen instruction.
BSL video instructions ensured standardized administration, which isimpossibleto achieve using paper-basedtests as BSL has no written form.
Scoring
The maximum BSL-CST score of 110 points is composed of seven component scores: orientation (9 points), attention (11), memory (27), fluency (7), language (39) visuospatial/perceptual (11), and executive function (6). O
