Chapter 17 The Assessment of Limb Apraxia: The Limb Apraxia Test

Limb apraxia has long been recognized as an impairment of purposive limb movements associated primarily with left hemispheric pathology. Its clinical assessment, however, typically has been highly subjective and variable. In this paper we discuss factors that are important to the assessment of limb apraxia, including the basic nature and categorization of movements to be assessed, methods for eliciting responses, the potential influence of aphasia on representational limb movements, salient response characteristics, and scoring of performance. We then describe the item, subtest structure, and scoring of the Limb Apraxia Test (LAT), an 80-item test of imitative unilateral upper limb movement, which was designed to meet the need for a valid and reliable quantitative measure of limb apraxia. Finally, we summarize the LAT performance of normal, right-hemisphere-damaged and left-hemisphere-damaged-aphasic groups, emphasizing data which demonstrate the reliability, validity, and usefulness of the test.