Estimating Intelligence in Spanish: Regression Equations With the Word Accentuation Test and Demographic Variables in Latin America

Abstract

Spanish is the fourth most spoken language in the world, and the majority of Spanish speakers have a Latin American origin. Reading aloud infrequently accentuated words has been established as a National Adult Reading Test-like method to assess premorbid intelligence in Spanish. However, several versions have been proposed and validated with small and selected samples, in particular geographical conditions, and they seldom derive a formula for IQ estimation with the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) Full-Scale IQ (FSIQ). The objective of this study was to develop equations to estimate WAIS-Third Edition (WAIS-III) FSIQ from the Word Accentuation Test-Revised (WAT-R), demographic variables, and their combination within diverse Latin American samples. Two hundred and forty participants from Argentina and Colombia, selected according to age and years of education strata, were assessed with the WAT-R, the WAIS-III, and a structured questionnaire about demographic and medical information. A combined approach including place of birth, years of education, and WAT-R provided the best equation, explaining 76% of IQ variance. These equations could be useful for estimating premorbid IQ in patients with Latin American Spanish as their birth language.

Development of the Korean Adult Reading Test (KART) to estimate premorbid intelligence in dementia patients

“…The correlations between the observed IQs and the KART-predicted IQs from the current study are analogous to those reported from other word-reading tests developed in different languages [5, 12, 13]; more specifically, the correlations between the observed IQ and the KART-, AMNART-, JART-, and WAT-R-predicted premorbid intelligence were 0.67, 0.73~0.79, 0.88, and 0.82, respectively. Slight differences in correlation coefficients may partly be due to presence of dialects/vernaculars in Korean language based on regions of where each participant was raised.…”

“…Similar to the previous studies [5, 12], the equations that used the KART errors and education and those with the KART errors alone were only slightly different. More specifically, inclusion of education as a predictor slightly reduced the standard error of the estimate (6.40 versus 6.97) and produced a small increase in the correlations (0.618 versus 0.614) between the KART-predicted IQs and the observed WAIS-IV IQs.…”

“…Following the NART, word-reading tests were developed in other languages such as the French adaptation of the NART (fNART) [11], the Word Accentuation Test (WAT) in Spanish [12], and the Japanese version of the NART (JART) [13]. To date, unfortunately, there are no similar tools developed or validated in Korean-speaking population.…”

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

“…Using that rationale, the WAT requests participants to read aloud a list of words without the accent marks. The WAT has been demonstrated to have adequate properties in Spain, Argentina, Colombia, and among Spanishspeaking immigrants in the United States 15,16,17,18 .…”

Efecto de concretud inverso en Afasia Progresiva Primaria-variante semántica: Estudio longitudinal de un paciente

“…Montañes, Sierra Matamoros, & Burin, 2014) que es un test de lectura de palabras complejas que permite conocer el nivel intelectual premórbido. Además, se administró la adaptación para Argentina de la Escala Addenbrooke's Cognitive Examination III(ACE-III) …”