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The effect of the degree of illiteracy (complete or incomplete) on phonological skills, verbal and visual memory and visuospatial skills is examined in 97 normal Brazilian adults who considered themselves illiterate, and 41 Brazilian school children aged 7 to 8 years, either nonreaders or beginning readers. Similar literacy effects were observed in children and in adults. Tasks involving phonological awareness and visual recognition memory of nonsense figures distinguish the best nonreaders and beginning readers. Children performed better than adults at oral repetition of short items and figure recall, and adults better than children at semantic verbal fluency, digit span, and word list recall. A principal component analysis of the correlations between tasks showed that phonological awareness/reading, phonological memory/oral repetition, and semantic verbal memory/fluency tasks, generated different components. The respective role of culturally based preschool activities and literacy on the cognitive functions that are explored in this study is discussed.

Calculation and number processing abilities were assessed in normal (n = 138) and traumatic brain-injured (n = 15) Brazilian literature subjects. The study aimed (i) to analyse the effects of demographic factors and to provide tentative norms adjusted for the relevant variables, (ii) to examine the factorial structure of the battery and to evaluate its clinical validity for diagnosis purposes, and (iii) to question the power of current models to account for effects and dissociations found for these groups. Analysis indicated a main effect of education on most subtests and of sex on three, but none for age. Cut-off scores for normality were defined at Percentile 10 with reference to education. The sensitivity of the battery to the presence of arithmetical impairments was considered satisfactory since 11 out of the 15 patients showed pathological scores. A principal component analysis indicated that the different sub-tests were grouped into three factors, which were tentatively interpreted with reference to current information-processing models. The multiple single-case analysis of dissociations in patients' performance suggested some limits with respect to anatomo-functional models of calculation and number processing.

Bilateral hand skill assessment with a computerised version of the Peg Moving Task, and neuropsychological testing, were performed in 30 children aged 7 to 8 years with spastic cerebral palsy (CP) and without mental retardation, diplegia (n = 10), right hemiplegia (n = 10), or left hemiplegia (n = 10), and in 30 controls. Compared to controls: (i) 30% of the hemiplegic children showed impairment of the unaffected hand and 70% of the diplegic children showed impairment in both hands; (ii) children with CP were impaired only in oral repetition and in visual-motor tasks. Results of neuropsychological testing were not significantly different between the three groups of children with CP. Right minus left asymmetry in hand skill was not related to neuropsychological testing; however, degree of impairment of the right hand was associated with phonological and metaphonological skills, and of the left hand with visuospatial and counting performance. Hand skill was related to the ability to perform many daily living manual activities. It is concluded that impairment of hand function, rather than the side of the more affected hand, is related to neuropsychological deficits in children with cerebral palsy.