Background: The Mississippi Aphasia Screening Test (MAST) is a brief screening test for assessing the expressive and receptive language abilities in patients with aphasia. The objective of the study was to develop and validate the Persian version of the MAST (MASTp) as a screening test for language disorders in patients with post-stroke aphasia.

Methods: This study used a cross-sectional design to cross-culturally adapt the MASTp following the guidelines for the process of cross-cultural adaptation of measures. A total of 40 subjects (20 patients with post-stroke aphasia and 20 healthy subjects) were included. The MASTp was tested for floor or ceiling effects, internal consistency reliability, intra-rater reliability, discriminative validity, and factor structure.

Results: There were no floor or ceiling effects for MASTp total score. The MASTp yielded values for internal consistency reliability that were not adequate (Cronbach’s alpha 0.64 and 0.66 for test and retest, respectively. The intra-rater reliability of the MASTp within a 7 day-interval was excellent for total score (ICC agreement= 0.96) and both expressive index (ICC= 0.95) and receptive index (ICC agreement= 0.98). here were statistically significant differences in MASTp total scores and both indexes between patients and healthy subjects suggesting the discriminative validity of the MASTp (P< 0.001). Factor analysis revealed a 3-factor solution, which jointly accounted for 72.06% of the total variance. Additional factor analysis suggested 6-item MASTp as a unidimensional measure.

Conclusion: The MASTp is useful as a valid and reliable screening tool for evaluation of language abilities in Persian speaking patients with aphasia after stroke.