Alexia Assessment--The Arizona Battery for Reading and Spelling

Author: Brett McCardel, MS, CCC-SLP

Alexia assessment is no simple task—there are LOTS of variables to consider that can influence reading performance, and it can be difficult to tease apart where a person’s breakdown in reading lies.⁣ When assessing alexia at the single-word level, one of the most powerful assessments out there is the 𝗔𝗿𝗶𝘇𝗼𝗻𝗮 𝗕𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗦𝗽𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 (ABRS). ⁣

The ABRS is a 100-item test that can be used for single-word reading and spelling assessment. Developed by Pelagie Beeson and colleagues at the University of Arizona, the ABRS is based on a Dual Route Cascaded Model of Reading, and helps to characterize an alexia profile through the following linguistic variables:⁣

-Real Words vs Nonwords: some items on the ABRS are Real Words, and some are Nonwords (or made up⁣ words); ability to read real words compared to nonwords gives insight into Grapheme-Phoneme Conversion skills⁣

-Regular vs Irregular Spelling: if a word follows conventional spelling and sound rules in English, it is considered Regularly-spelled (e.g., cat); words that have letters and sounds that do not follow conventional letter and sound rules are considered Irregularly-spelled (e.g., yacht)⁣

-Imageability: this refers to how concrete or abstract a word is (essentially, how easy it is to develop a mental picture of the word); some words are high-imageability (e.g., jury), while others are low-imageability (e.g., justice)⁣

-# of Letters: depending on a person’s reading difficulties, some words may be more difficult to read due to how many letters are in them ⁣

With all of these factors taken together, you can then perform error analysis to determine whether there is a Peripheral Alexia, a Central Alexia, or a combination of both!⁣

The ABRS is 𝗙𝗥𝗘𝗘 to download from https://aphasia.sites.arizona.edu/content/8. To learn more about the Dual Cascaded Model of Reading and the different alexia profiles, check out the Archways Resources page!⁣

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