An automated version of the BAT Syntactic Comprehension task for assessing auditory L2 proficiency in healthy adults

Studies of bilingualism sometimes require healthy subjects to be assessed for proficiency at auditory sentence processing in their second language (L2). The Syntactic Comprehension task of the Bilingual Aphasia Test could satisfy this need. For ease and uniformity of application, we automated its English (Paradis, M., Libben, G., and Hummel, K. (1987). The Bilingual Aphasia Test. English version. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates) and French (Paradis, M., & Goldblum, M. C. (1987). The Bilingual Aphasia Test, French version. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates) versions. Although the Bilingual Aphasia Test is meant to assess neurological disorders affecting language, we hypothesised that ceiling performance in L2 would be rare and L2 errors should be consistent with lack of processing automaticity. Initial data from 13 French-English and 4 English-French bilinguals confirm these expectations. Thus, the automated Syntactic Comprehension task (available online for PC and Mac platforms) is indeed suited to test bilingual English and French proficiency levels in healthy adults.