Contextual Reading and Metalinguistic Processing in Brazilian Portuguese: A Longitudinal Study

Metalinguistic skill is the ability to reflect upon language as an object of thought. Amongst metalinguistic skills, two seem to be associated with reading and spelling: morphological awareness and phonological awareness. Phonological awareness is the ability of reflecting upon the phonemes that compose words, and morphological awareness is the ability of reflecting upon the morphemes that compose the words. The latter seems to be particularly important for reading comprehension and contextual reading, as beyond phonological information, syntactic and semantic information are required. This study is set to investigate - with a longitudinal design - the relation between those abilities and contextual reading measured by the Cloze test. The first part of the study explores the relationship between morphological awareness tasks and Cloze scores through simple correlations and, in the second part, the specificity of such relationship was inquired using multiple regressions. The results give some support to the hypothesis that morphological awareness offers an independent contribution regarding phonological awareness to contextual reading in Brazilian Portuguese.

Language impairment in Huntington's disease

Language alterations in Huntington's disease (HD) are reported, but their nature and correlation with other cognitive impairments are still under investigation. This study aimed to characterize the language disturbances in HD and to correlate them to motor and cognitive aspects of the disease. We studied 23 HD patients and 23 controls, matched for age and schooling, using the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination, Boston Naming Test, the Token Test, Animal fluency, Action fluency, FAS-COWA, the Symbol Digit Modalities Test, the Stroop Test and the Hooper Visual Organization Test (HVOT). HD patients performed poorer in verbal fluency (p<0.0001), oral comprehension (p<0.0001), repetition (p<0.0001), oral agility (p<0.0001), reading comprehension (p=0.034) and narrative writing (p<0.0001). There was a moderate correlation between the Expressive Component and Language Competency Indexes and the HVOT (r=0.519, p=0.011 and r=0.450, p=0.031, respectively). Language alterations in HD seem to reflect a derangement in both frontostriatal and frontotemporal regions.