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Validation of Spanish language dyspepsia questionnaire. No dyspepsia-specific questionnaire currently exists in Spanish. The Spanish Language Dyspepsia Questionnaire (SLDQ) was developed based on Rome dyspepsia criteria, other questionnaires, and common symptoms. Self-reported normal and dyspeptic volunteers (N = 63) in Chiapas, Mexico, participated in a validation study. We assessed intra- and interrater reliability by test-retest studies and established validity by both correlation to the Short Form-36 (SF-36) and comparison of scores between normals and dyspeptics. The total SLDQ score showed a wide distribution (range 0-78, mean 23.7 +/- 21.9). Internal reliability of the SLDQ was high (Cronbach's a = 0.93). Intra- and interrater reliability were excellent (scores from the first and second interviews not statistically different; P = 0.94; intraclass correlation coefficient = 0.96). SLDQ scales correlated appropriately with the SF-36. The SLDQ distinguished self-classified normals from dyspeptics (P < 0.001). The SLDQ fills the unmet need for a valid, reproducible, and multidimensional Spanish-language instrument to measure dyspepsia. Additionally, we have made suggestions for the development of symptom-quantifying questionnaires. dds
Switching languages, switching palabras (words): an electrophysiological study of code switching. Switching languages has often been associated with a processing cost. In this study, the authors used event-related potentials to compare switches between two languages with within-language lexical switches as bilinguals read for comprehension. Stimuli included English sentences and idioms ending either with the expected English words, their Spanish translations (code switches), or English synonyms (lexical switches). As expected, lexical switches specifically enhanced the N400 response in both context types. Code switches, by contrast, elicited an increased negativity over left fronto-central sites in the regular nonidiomatic sentences (250-450 ms) and a large posterior positivity (450-850 ms) in both context types. In addition, both lexical and code switches elicited a late frontal positivity (650-850 ms) relative to expected completions, especially in idioms. Analysis of the individual response patterns showed correlations with vocabulary skills in English and in Spanish. Overall, the electrophysiological data suggest that for some speakers in some contexts, the processing of a code switch may actually be less costly than the processing of an unexpected within-language item. Copyright 2002 Elsevier Science (USA). bl
Motion events in language and cognition. This study investigated whether different lexicalization patterns of motion events in English and Spanish predict how speakers of these languages perform in non-linguistic tasks. Using 36 motion events, we compared English and Spanish speakers' linguistic descriptions to their performance on two non-linguistic tasks: recognition memory and similarity judgments. We investigated the effect of language processing on non-linguistic performance by varying the nature of the encoding before testing for recognition and similarity. Participants encoded the events while describing them verbally or not. No effect of language was obtained in the recognition memory task after either linguistic or non-linguistic encoding and in the similarity task after non-linguistic encoding. We did find a linguistic effect in the similarity task after verbal encoding, an effect that conformed to language-specific patterns. Linguistic descriptions directed attention to certain aspects of the events later used to make a non-linguistic judgment. This suggests that linguistic and non-linguistic performance are dissociable, but language-specific regularities made available in the experimental context may mediate the speaker's performance in specific tasks. c
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