Normative data for the Brazilian population in the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination: influence of schooling

Abstract

In Neurolinguistics, the use of diagnostic tests developed in other countries can create difficulties in the interpretation of results due to cultural, demographic and linguistic differences. In a country such as Brazil, with great social contrasts, schooling exerts a powerful influence on the abilities of normal individuals. The objective of the present study was to identify the influence of schooling on the performance of normal Brazilian individuals in the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE), in order to obtain reference values for the Brazilian population. We studied 107 normal subjects ranging in age from 15 to 84 years (mean ± SD = 47.2 ± 17.6 years), with educational level ranging from 1 to 24 years (9.9 ± 4.8 years). Subjects were compared for scores obtained in the 28 subtests of the BDAE after being divided into groups according to age (15 to 30, N = 24, 31 to 50, N = 33 and 51 years or more, N = 50) and education (1 to 4, N = 26, 5 to 8, N = 17 and 9 years or more, N = 61). Subjects with 4 years or less of education performed poorer in Word Discrimination, Visual Confrontation Naming, Reading of Sentences and Paragraphs, and Primer-Level Dictation (P < 0.05). When breakdown by schooling was 8 years or less, subjects performed poorer in all subtests (P < 0.05), except Responsive Naming, Word Recognition and WordPicture Matching. The elderly performed poorer (P < 0.05) in Complex Ideational Material, Visual Confrontation Naming, Comprehension of Oral Spelling, Written Confrontation Naming, and Sentences to Dictation. We present the reference values for the cut-off scores according to educational level.

Influence of schooling on language abilities of adults without linguistic disorders

“…Therefore, individuals with five years of schooling or more performed better ( Table 1). Our study identified differences in these tasks according to schooling level ( Table 1), and our findings are in agreement with those of Radanovic et al 8 The study by the latter authors involved applying the Boston test, and it also found differences according to schooling, in relation to the tasks of naming by visual comparison (written task based on pictures), reading of paragraphs and sentences and firstlevel dictation (word dictation). Their results clearly showed that exposure to formal schooling promotes development in these skills.…”

“…18,22,23 One hypothesis for this could be that schooling facilitates organization of categories and semantic subgroups. 18 In our study, the mean score in the lexical availability task among the normal healthy subjects was approximately 19 ( 8 in studies that did not include illiterate subjects or those with less than four years of formal education.…”

“…Social and schooling differences in batteries of neuropsychological tests have been reported by Bertolucci et al, 17 and similarly by Pineda et al 9 and Radanovic et al 8 in language assessment tests. Oral and graphical comprehension tasks involve comprehension of words and phrases.…”

“…The sample size calculation for this study was n = [(Z α/2 x σ)/E]2, taking a 5% significance level, a standard deviation of 7.5 according to a comparative study between different schooling levels 8 and a standard error of 2.0. This calculation yielded a minimum sample size for this study of 54 individuals.…”

Expressive Aphasia: Reporting a Phonological Retrieval Hypothesis for Auditory Verbal Memory Deficits

“…As science progresses, models are being reviewed and some skills (such as auditory verbal memory and working memory) are being directly linked to language processing. As ethics and client centered perspectives postulate, clinical practice should follow scientific progress [14,15].…”