Local Psycholinguistic Considerations in Neuropsychological Assessment. The Argentine Spanish Experience

MANOILOFF, L.; VIVAS, L.; MARTINEZ CUITIÑO, M.

Chicago

Conferencia; Alzheimer´s Association International Conference; 2018

Alzheimer´s Association

Background. At the moment to adapt and develop neuropsychological tests it is essential to consider some relevant psycholinguistic variables that may vary between cultures and consequently bias participants´ responses. In order to obtain values for those variables, regional psycholinguistic norms are developed. We have built three normative corpuses with Argentinean scores for concept, image and features variables. In the current presentation we will first describe each of them, then illustrate the way they can be used in test construction and adaptation, and third establish some comparisons between languages. Methods. Materials: three Argentinean normative bases: 1) Expanded Norms for 400 Experimental Pictures (Manoiloff et al., 2010); 2) Semantic and Latency Times Norms (Martínez-Cuitiño et al., 2015); 3) Semantic Feature Production Norms (Vivas et al., 2017). Data analysis: a) Pearson correlations were calculated to compare Spanish, French and English psycholinguistic norms for Name Agreement (NA), Image Agreement, Familiarity, Visual Complexity and Image Variability; b) a geometric vector comparison technique was performed between English and Spanish feature lists for 200 concepts.Results. a) NA proved to be the one that depends the most on language and/or culture, since it obtained the most diverse values (Min = 18, Max = 100) and the lowest correlations between the Argentinean study and previous studies in Spanish (r = .54), French (r = .37) and English (r = .30); b) Similarities between the core components of semantic representations in Spanish and English were observed in most of the concepts (the 3rd quartil of the correlations was situated in .4), although some relevant features differed between languages in certain concepts (eg. football was the most relevant feature for `ball´ in Argentine but did not appear in English norms). Features? concordance was higher for Living, than for Non-living Things (z = -4.638; p < .001).Conclusions. Our results show some coincidences between languages but also some important differences in relevant psycholinguistic variables which make it essential to consider local normative data in order to select the appropriated stimuli to build neuropsychological tests.