Development of a word accentuation test for predicting cognitive performance in Portuguese-speaking populations

Abstract

The Word Accentuation Test (WAT) has been used to predict premorbid intelligence and cognitive performance in Spanish-speaking populations. It requires participants to read a list of words without the accent marks that indicate the stressed syllable. Objective: As Portuguese pronunciation is also strongly based on accent marks, our aim was to develop a Brazilian version of the WAT. Methods: An initial pool of 60 items was constructed and a final version of 40 items (named WAT-Br) was derived by item response theory. A sample of 206 older adults underwent the WAT-Br and a standardized neuropsychological battery. Independent ratings were performed by two observers in 58 random participants. Results: The items showed moderate to high discrimination (α between 0.93 and 25.04) and spanned a wide range of difficulty (β between −2.07 and 1.40). The WAT-Br was shown to have an excellent internal consistency (Kuder-Richardson Formula 20 = 0.95) and inter-rater reliability (intraclass correlation coefficient = 0.92). It accounted for 61% of the variance in global cognitive performance. Conclusion: A version of the WAT for Portuguese-speaking populations was developed and proved to be a valuable tool for estimating cognitive performance.

Estimation of premorbid intelligence and executive cognitive functions with lexical reading tasks.

“…However, the principle works well in languages which lack that feature. In languages that have few irregularly pronounced words, such as Spanish or Portuguese, lexically driven pronunciation can be forced by using words that require a particular stress, but for which the stress pattern information (i.e., the accent marks) has been removed (e.g., Del Ser et al, 1997; Gil et al, 2019). Or by using loan words, which do have irregular pronunciation, such as in the Swedish version of the NART (Rolstad et al, 2008).…”

“…In addition, a task of pronouncing low-frequency irregularly spelled words, the National Adult Reading Test (NART; Nelson & Willison, 1991), has an equivalently high load on the g factor (Crawford et al, 1989). Accordingly, word-pronunciation tasks have consistently been found to correlate very highly with standardized intelligence tests (Del Ser et al, 1997;Gil et al, 2019;Matsuoka et al, 2006;Nelson & Willison, 1991;Wechsler, 2001).…”