On the use of pseudoword reading as estimate of premorbid intelligence in brain injured, psychopathological, or cognitively impaired patients

Abstract

In this opinion article we discuss the adequacy to employ pseudoword reading (PWR) performance as an estimator of premorbid intelligence (PI), at least in transparent languages. Patients' current PWR level and scores on other reading tasks (e.g., irregular words reading) have been proposed as valid measures to estimate PI on the premises that they correlate with intelligence scores and show relative resistance to cognitive impairment caused by brain injury or illness (Del Pino et al., 2018, 2020). Del Pino et al. (2018) developed norms of behavioral data from two reading tasks (i.e., word accentuation and PWR) in adult Spanish speaking population in order to use them as estimates of PI in brain injured, psychopathological, or cognitively impaired populations. Later, Del Pino et al. (2020) suggested that given reading tasks could usefully complement other variables such as age and years of education to estimate more accurately the cognitive performance in Parkinson's disease. However, we defend the position that there is not sufficient direct evidence of the relationship between PWR and PI. In what follows, we provide arguments that challenge the use of PWR performance as an estimator of PI.