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

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 structural and semantic aspects of language, 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 abilitiesAimThis 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 non-literal language, to enable reliable and time-efficient evaluation of pragmatics in German-speaking contexts.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 in a sample of healthy German-speaking adults.ResultsThe APACS Brief-De Multiple Choice showed good consistency, reliability, validity, and equivalence between forms. Age and global cognitive performance significantly influenced pragmatic scores. 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 the global pragmatic profile, well-suited for integration into routine clinical practice, and represents a significant step toward crosslinguistic standardization of pragmatic assessment.