De Metaforentaak als Test voor Woordbegrip

In this study, a Dutch version of the metaphor task (Heesbeen e.a., 1990) is' standardized and normed within a group of adults with acquired brain damage, as well as within a comparable healthy control group. The aim is to construct a test for measuring problems in word comprehension and for eventually evaluating the recovery from these problems in patients with mild aphasie or non-aphasic language problems.It appears that, according to Mokken's scale analysis the Metaphor task consists of a homogeneous set of items (Hi—.35). This homogeneity can be maximized to Hi—.45 within an optimal subset of 19 items. Moreover, the original task can be subdivided in two subsets, each consisting of 19 comparable items, without loss of homogeneity.Both the original task and the two comparable subdivisions appears to be able to reflect problems in word comprehension as well as aspects of their recovery. Therefore, in this study percentile norms for the three subject groups mentioned were computed.