Abstract
Apraxia is a common impairment following stroke, although the extent to which apraxia is related to function in daily living is not clear due to how both apraxia and functional performance are measured. Commonly, apraxia is evaluated using only one performance modality such as imitation. Apraxia though is thought to arise from breakdowns at different stages in gesture production and so needs to be assessed over multiple modalities reflecting sensory-perceptual, conceptual and production dimensions of performance. Functional performance in daily living is also multi-factorial and places demands on comparable dimensions of performance. Given these commonalities it would seem important to capture these dimensions of performance in measures of function in daily living. Accordingly we developed the Apraxia Behavioural Checklist (ABC) which captures performance that reflects sensory-perceptual, conceptual and production errors. In this study involving 30 people with left-hemisphere stroke we examined the relationship between performance on the conceptual, pantomime, and imitation subtests of the Waterloo-Sunnybrook Apraxia Battery and observations of comparable dimensions of functional performance on the ABC. Several of the apraxia tests were found to be significantly correlated with performance on the ABC. The implications of these findings for understanding the relationship between apraxia and function in daily living are discussed.Acknowledgments: Toronto Rehabilitation Institute