Picture Description of the Western Aphasia Battery Picnic Scene: Reference Data for the French Canadian Population.

Purpose The main aim of this study is to provide French Canadian reference data for quantitative measures extracted from connected speech samples elicited by the Western Aphasia Battery-Revised picnic scene, a discourse task frequently used in clinical assessment of acquired language disorders. Method Our sample consisted of 62 healthy French Canadian adults divided in two age groups: a 50- to 69-year-old group and a 70- to 90-year-old group. Results High interrater reliability scores were obtained for most of the variables. Most connected speech variables did not demonstrate an age effect. However, the 70- to 90-year-old group produced more repetitions than the 50- to 69-year-old group and displayed reduced communication efficiency (number of information content units per minute). Conclusion These findings contribute to building a reference data set to analyze descriptive discourse production in clinical settings.