Poster Session 11 Program Schedule
02/17/2024
10:45 am - 12:00 pm
Room: Majestic Complex (Posters 61-120)
Poster Session 11: Cultural Neuropsychology | Education/Training | Professional Practice Issues
Final Abstract #88
Same Language, Different Country: Minority Group Performance on the NEPSY-II
Johanna Rosenqvist, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
Susanna Slama, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
Anu Haavisto, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
Category: Cross Cultural Neuropsychology/ Clinical Cultural Neuroscience
Keyword 1: child development (normal)
Keyword 2: cognitive functioning
Keyword 3: cross-cultural issues
Objective:
Conducting reliable neuropsychological assessments with minority language and cultural groups is complicated, as such groups seldom have specific cognitive tests and norms. Instead, tests developed in a majority cultural setting are often used and information regarding the generalizability of the test to the minority group may be lacking. Children from the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland (5.2% of the inhabitants) are often assessed with the Swedish NEPSY-II with U.S. normative data. The present study investigated how Finland-Swedish children performed on linguistic tasks from the Swedish NEPSY-II as compared to the normative mean. Thus, the aim of the study was to investigate the generalizability of the subtests in order to obtain information for clinical use as well as for future studies.
Participants and Methods:
The participants were 275 typically developing 5–16-year-old monolingual Swedish-speaking or simultaneous bilingual Swedish-Finnish-speaking children from Finland. The data was derived from The FinSwed Study. The children were assessed with verbal subtests from the NEPSY-II: Seven subtests from the Language and Memory/Learning domains were included. Scores were scaled using the U.S. norms and the results were compared to the U.S. normative mean using bootstrapped confidence interval analyses. Relationships with background variables were investigated with multiple linear regression analyses.
Results:
A significant difference to the normative mean was found for the subtests Comprehension of Instructions, Phonological Processing, Word Generation Semantic, List Memory, and Sentence Repetition. In these subtests, the Finland-Swedish sample performed significantly higher than the normative mean. For the subtests Word Generation Initial Letter, Narrative Memory, and Word List Interference, no significant differences were found. Further, when the relationship with background variables was investigated, there was a significant association of age for some subtests. Girls received higher scores than boys on some subtests, as did children with higher parental educational level.
Conclusions:
The present study confirmed that performance on neurocognitive tasks differ when different cultural groups are assessed. However, differences do not always occur for all tasks in a consistent manner. For some linguistic subtests from the Swedish NEPSY-II, the norms seemed suitable for the Finland-Swedish minority group. Other subtests seemed more sensitive to cultural influence, which should be considered in clinical assessments. In all, the findings highlight the need for culture-specific norms or, if norms are not available, studies investigating the generalizability of the tests used with the minority group. The present findings have clinical relevance specifically for Finland-Swedish neuropsychologists, but may in an international context call for cautiousness in cross-cultural clinical assessments.
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