1997 Articles

Cross-cultural neuropsychological assessment: A comparison of randomly selected, demographically matched cohorts of English-and Spanish-speaking older adults

Jacobs, Diane M.; Sano, Mary; Albert, Steven; Schofield, Peter; Dooneief, George; Stern, Yaakov

As the US population of elderly Hispanics continues to grow, there is an increasingly greater need for neuropsychological measures that are appropriate for assessing Spanish-speakingelders. The current study compared the performance of randomly selected, community-based samples of English- and Spanishspeaking elders on a brief neuropsychological test battery. Subject groups were matched for age and education. Multivariate analysis indicated significant group differences on the test battery. English and Spanish speakers scored comparably on many language-based tasks, but Spanish speakers scored significantly lower on almost all of the nonverbal measures. Significant group differences were observed on multiplechoice matching and recognition memory for stimuli from the Benton Visual Retention Test, as well as on Identities and Oddities from the Mattis Dementia Rating Scale, category fluency, and Complex Ideational Material from the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE). Results suggest that caution is warranted when using nonverbal as well as verbal measures to assess non-English-speaking individuals.