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Hindi and English Letter Cancellation Tasks : Does language have an effect on performance?
Abstract:
Letter Cancellation Tasks (LCTs) are paper-pencil based psychomotor tasks that are commonly used to assess cognitive functions of healthy volunteers and patients. The performance on LCTs can be affected by the proficiency in the language used for the tasks. This is of importance in a country like India where most of the population is not fluent in English. Since most of the cognitive tests are in English, the population that can be recruited for cognitive studies gets limited. It is therefore essential to develop tests in Indian languages like Hindi and compare the results obtained with tests in English. The present study evaluated the effect of Hindi and English language on performance of one, two and three letter cancellation tasks. The study was conducted on 50 healthy volunteers after taking written, informed consent. Subjects were asked to cancel out letters in One, Two and Three LCTs in Hindi and English language. The total time taken to complete each test and number of errors were statistically analyzed by unpaired t-test. The results revealed that a significantly longer time was taken to complete Hindi LCTs than English LCTs. The error rates in the Hindi LCTs were more than that in English with the difference in One Letter Cancellation Task being significant. This is probably because of the complex script for Hindi requiring more time and neural resources for processing.
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