Standardized neuropsychological tests are routinely used as diagnostic criteria in aging populations and are an important piece of evidence for the identification of clinical pathology and neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's disease. Tests include such measures as the Mini Mental Status Exam, Delis-Kaplan Executive Function System, Montreal Cognitive Assessment, and others. These tests cover a range of functions including working memory, verbal fluency, prospective memory, and task switching. Interpretation of test results is based on comparison of the participant's score to standard scores that have been normed on a population database. However, a growing body of research has shown that the skills underlying these tests may be significantly different in monolingual and bilingual older adults, especially for those experiencing cognitive impairment, yet the standardized test scores do not account for such differences. Therefore, results of neuropsychological tests may be different for bilingual populations than for monolinguals, and those differences may be misinterpreted. The issue is important because the consequences of these interpretative errors may be over- or under- diagnosis of cognitive impairment. The present study examined the neuropsychological test scores of monolingual and bilingual older adults who were experiencing healthy aging or cognitive impairment to establish patterns in these scores that can more accurately guide the interpretation for bilingual older adults by considering group differences in the underlying abilities.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2016.08.001 | DOI Listing |
J Clin Nurs
January 2025
Research Platform for Collaboration for Health, Faculty of Health Science, Kristianstad University, Kristianstad, Sweden.
Aim: To cross-culturally adapt a framework for person-centred leadership in residential care for older people in Sweden.
Design: This study has an exploratory and descriptive design.
Methods: The translation procedure followed a cyclic process of translation into Swedish and back-translation into English by two independent bilingual linguists.
Med Res Arch
November 2024
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road, EE 428 & 526, Boca Raton, FL, 33431.
Background: Ignoring the cultural factors that can affect performance on cognitive tests may result in use of tests that have not been validated for that group. One example is testing of Haitian Creole speaking adults who are increasingly affected by Alzheimer's disease and related dementias, for whom few tests have been validated.
Aims: Our purpose is to describe differences in timed test performance between Haitian Creole and English-speaking participants and explore factors that may account for any differences in results found.
J Gerontol B Psychol Sci Soc Sci
January 2025
Linguistics and English as a Second Language, Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands.
Objectives: The complex life experience of speaking two or more languages has been suggested to preserve cognition in older adulthood. This study aimed to investigate this further by examining the relationship between multilingual experience variables and cognitive functioning in a large cohort of older adults in the diversely multilingual north of the Netherlands.
Method: 11,332 older individuals participating in the Lifelines Cohort Study completed a language experience questionnaire.
Health Data Sci
January 2024
Department of Global Health, School of Public Health, Peking University, Beijing, China.
Digital exclusion is a global issue that disproportionately affects older individuals especially in low- and middle-income nations. However, there is a wide gap in current research regarding the impact of digital exclusion on the mental health of older adults in both high-income and low- and middle-income countries. We analyzed data from 5 longitudinal cohorts: the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), the English Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA), the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), and the Mexican Health and Aging Study (MHAS).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Arabic development of Syrian refugee children ( = 133; mean age = 9;4 at Time 1) was examined over 3 time periods during their first five years in Canada. Children were administered sentence repetition and receptive vocabulary tasks in English and Arabic, and information about age-of-arrival (AOA), schooling in Arabic and language environment factors was obtained via parent report. Older AOA was associated with superior Arabic abilities across time, but regardless of AOA, children showed plateau/attrition patterns in Arabic and shifts to English dominance by Time 3.
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