Research Digest – October 2019 – Asian Neuropsychological Association

Author: Gabriel Qi

For our October ANA Student Committee Research Digest, I would like to shift our
focus to yet another Asian country, the Philippines.

Dominguez and colleagues (2019) developed normative data for the Filipino Norming
Project neuropsychological battery, which comprise of the Tagalog versions of the
Alzheimer’s Disease Assessment Scale – Cognitive (ADAS-Cog) and the
Neuropsychological Test Battery from the Uniform Dataset of Alzheimer’s Disease
Center (UDS-ADC). The dataset was made of 191 participants with a mean age of
68.8 years (SD 5.4; divided into 60-69 and ≥ 70 groups) and a mean years of
education at 9.1 years (SD 3.7).

Of note, the Tagalog adaptation for the ADAS-Cog included modifications of words in
list-recall and recognition, whereas modifications in UDS-ADC battery only include
two minor ones in logical memory to contextualize geographical location and
currency. However, after collecting the data, they found that the Filipino older adults
with normal cognition struggled with some of the tasks, such as naming the middle
and ring fingers (arguably due to lack of necessity to know the terms in daily living)
and copying the cube (possibly because primary education did not emphasize
learning how to draw a 3-D figure). Eventually, the authors provided a norm for
Filipino adults with age and education stratification, suitable to be used among
Tagalog-speaking populations aged 60 years or older. However, since the majority
(84.1%) of the sample were women, no gender stratification was made despite
significant differences in performances on some tests between male and female
subjects.

For the second article, I present you an article on the intergenerational transmission
of literacy skills among Filipino families. My apologies for the pediatric colleagues out
there for not having included more child-related articles! For this one, the authors
made efforts to understand how home literacy environment (HLE) and parent’s
reading skills influence their children’s language and literacy skills, among a low- to
middle-income sample. Besides other findings, I want to highlight that the authors
made efforts to first consider how to characterize the HLE for the 5- to 8-year-old
Filipino children. They used various measures to assess the children’s oral language
skills and print knowledge in both English and Cebuano, and made modifications to
the scoring method in accordance to unique characteristics of the Cebuano language
and local instructional methods (Cartilla vs. Marungko approaches).

Food for thought this month:

What are some thoughts on specific modifications to both items of certain tests and
test paradigms when assessing cognitive functioning in non-English languages?

Here are the links to access the articles this month:

References:

• Dominguez, J. C., Phung, T. K. T., de Guzman, M. F. P., Fowler, K. C., Reandelar Jr,
M., Natividad, B., … & Ligsay, A. D. (2019). Determining Filipino Normative Data for
a Battery of Neuropsychological Tests: The Filipino Norming Project
(FNP). Dementia and Geriatric Cognitive Disorders Extra, 9(2), 260-270.
doi:10.1159/000500519
• Dulay, K. M., Cheung, S. K., & McBride, C. (2019). Intergenerational transmission of
literacy skills among Filipino families. Developmental Science, 22, doi:
10.1111/desc.12859.