Fernando Cuetos

• Prof. Psychology
• Professor (Full) at University of Oviedo

Background Clinical diagnosis in primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is challenging. Recently, emphasis has been placed on the importance of screening evaluation. Three different screening tests that use different strategies based on the assessment of language (Mini-Linguistic State Examination, MLSE) or different cognitive domains (Addenbrooke's Cog...

En este trabajo se analiza el desarrollo de los predictores de la lectura (conciencia fonológica y velocidad en denominación) en primero, segundo y tercero de educación infantil y primero de primaria. Se seleccionó una muestra de 484 alumnos de cinco colegios de Galicia. Para la evaluación de la conciencia fonológica se utilizó la Prueba de Conocim...

The present study examined the process of L2 orthographic learning in bilinguals with distant L1-L2 orthographies. Chinese-English bilinguals with various English proficiency levels were trained with novel L2 words during a reading task. In contrast to higher proficient learners, those with lower L2 proficiency exhibited increased effects of length...

The Wernicke-Geschwind model has been considered the main reference in regard to the neural basis of language function. Indeed, this model has been systematically used to explain and interpret different aphasic disorders. However, recent findings across several neuroimaging studies challenge the suitability of this model to explain the cerebral dyn...

Recent research has stated that early oral language acquisition difficulties are related to reading and writing difficulties. Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) experience difficulties with several dimensions of language. In this study we focus on the specific difficulties of children with DLD in spelling. We examine the impact of...

Background: The expressiveness during reading is essential for a fluent reading. Reading prosody has been scarcely studied in an experimental manner, owing to the difficulties in taking objective and direct measures of this reading skill. However, new technologies development has made it possible to analyse reading prosody in an experimental way....

It is common to see mirror errors in letters in early stages of reading due to the mirror-generalization process that allows a visual stimulus to be identified independently of its orientation. To avoid such errors, this process must be inhibited. A special case would be children with dyslexia since their difficulties with the alphabetic code may a...

Several studies have been carried out in various languages to explore the role of the main psycholinguistic variables in word naming, mainly in nouns. However, reading of verbs has not been explored to the same extent, despite the differences that have been found between the processing of nouns and verbs. To reduce this research gap, we present her...

Aims There are several candidate biomarkers for AD and PD which differ in sensitivity, specificity, cost-effectiveness, invasiveness, logistical and technical demands. This study is aimed to test whether plasma concentration of unfolded p53 may help to discriminate among the neurodegenerative processes occurring in Mild Cognitive Impairment, Alzhei...

Background Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a clinical syndrome characterized by gradual loss of language skills. This study aimed to evaluate the diagnostic capacity of a connected speech task for the diagnosis of PPA and its variants, to determine the main components of spontaneous speech, and to examine their neural correlates. Methods A to...

Background Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a neurodegenerative syndrome with three main clinical variants: non-fluent, semantic, and logopenic. Clinical diagnosis and accurate classification are challenging and often time-consuming. The Mini-Linguistic State Examination (MLSE) has been recently developed as a short language test to specificall...

Background Reading fluency is essential for our functioning in the literate society in which we live. Reading expressiveness or prosody, along with speed and accuracy, are considered key aspects of fluent reading. Prosodic patterns may vary, not being the same in children learning to read as in adulthood. But little is known about the prosodic char...

Spelling and handwriting are different processes; however, they are learned simultaneously, and numerous studies have shown that they interact. Besides the commonly reported presence of a spelling deficit, previous studies have indicated that handwriting difficulties can also be detected in children with dyslexia. Despite this, this issue has not b...

Purpose: The mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a neurocognitive disorder which involves cognitive impairments beyond those expected for the age and education of the subject but are not significant enough to interfere with instrumental activities of daily living. The identification of individuals with MCI is particularly important for those who mi...

Background Although some studies suggest that writing difficulties may be one of the early symptoms of Alzheimer's disease (AD), they have been scarcely studied compared to oral language. Particularly noteworthy is the paucity of longitudinal studies that enable the observation of writing impairment as cognitive decline progresses. Objective The a...

Background Novel word acquisition is generally believed to be a rapid process, essential for ensuring a flexible and efficient communication system; at least in spoken language, learners are able to construct memory traces for new linguistic stimuli after just a few exposures. However, such rapid word learning has not been systematically found in v...

Background Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a clinical syndrome of neurodegenerative origin with three main clinical variants (nonfluent, semantic, and logopenic). Clinical diagnosis and accurate classification into the three clinical variants is challenging and often time‐consuming. The Mini‐Linguistic State Examination (MLSE) has been recentl...

The present study addresses how handwriting speed increases with age among Spanish 8-, 10- and 12-year-old children (n = 60), and how this progression is related to spelling and more general graphic skills. Handwriting speed was measured in a spelling-to-dictation and a copying task, and graphic speed was measured in a trail tracing task. Results r...

The acquisition of new vocabulary is usually mediated by previous experience with language. In the visual domain, the representation of orthographically unfamiliar words at the phonological or conceptual levels may facilitate their orthographic learning. The neural correlates of this advantage were investigated by recording EEG activity during read...

Herramienta para detectar tempranamente casos potenciales de dislexia y ayudar al diagnóstico diferencial.

The presence of semantic memory dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease (AD) has been widely investigated. Several studies have showed a higher degree of impairment in naming persons and objects, compared to general semantic knowledge in early stages of AD. The aim of this study was to investigate if the Famous Faces Naming Test can help to differentiat...

Background Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a clinical syndrome including a group of neurodegenerative disorders that present with language impairment. We hypothesised that impairment in reading prosody may be present in a subgroup of patients with PPA, and particularly non-fluent PPA (nfvPPA), because of the impairment of key brain regions inv...

Correct stress assignment is a requirement for fluent reading in alphabetic languages. This study focuses on two nonlexical mechanisms at the core of stress assignment. In particular, the use of a default stress pattern (e.g., penultimate stress) and the Spanish stress mark. In Experiment 1, participants read aloud words and pseudowords with differ...

This study investigated which components of the writing production process are impaired in Spanish children with developmental dyslexia (DD) aged 8 to 12 years. Children with and without dyslexia ( n = 60) were assessed in their use of the lexical and the sublexical routes of spelling as well as the orthographic working memory system by manipulatin...

Previous literature has indicated that linguistic and motor processes influence each other during written sentence production, and that the scope of this influence varies according to spelling ability or cognitive resources available. This study investigated how the spelling deficits associated with dyslexia affect the dynamics of the interaction b...

Prosodic reading is one of the steps needed to achieve reading fluency. It is already known that English children develop their reading prosody from the earliest grades of primary school, showing the greatest improvement between first and second grade, but there are no Spanish studies of the development of reading prosody in the first years of scho...

Background: Studies of the relationship between reading fluency and reading comprehension have traditionally focused on primary schools and narrative texts. However, reading fluency continues to develop during secondary school, when the texts used most are expository texts. Method: The aim of our study was to investigate reading fluency and read...

Purpose: to translate and culturally adapt, for Brazil, the battery of tests "Evaluación de los procesos lectores - PROLEC-SE-R", for students of Elementary School cycle II, and Senior High School. Methods: The following stages of translation and cultural adaptation were followed: (1) Translation; (2) Synthesis of translations; (3) Back-translat...

Previous research has pointed out that the combination of orthographic and semantic-associative training is a more advantageous strategy for the lexicalization of novel written word-forms than their single orthographic training. However, paradigms used previously involve explicit stimuli categorization (lexical decision), which likely influence wor...

Several studies have illuminated how processing manual action verbs (MaVs) affects the programming or execution of concurrent hand movements. Here, to circumvent key confounds in extant designs, we conducted the first assessment of motor-language integration during handwriting a task in which linguistic and motoric processes are co-substantiated. P...

Introduction Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a clinical syndrome of neurodegenerative origin with 3 main variants: non-fluent, semantic, and logopenic. However, there is some controversy about the existence of additional subtypes. Our aim was to study the language and cognitive features associated with a new proposed classification for PPA. M...

In transparent orthographic systems, the main characteristic of developmental dyslexia is poor reading fluency. Several studies have reported that children with dyslexia have difficulties forming orthographic representations of words, which hampers good reading fluency. This study aimed at evaluating whether the semantic–phonological training prior...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients are known to present semantic memory impairments, and semantic processing plays a crucial role in the formation of false memories. We assessed 40 early stage AD patients and 35 matched healthy volunteers with an emotional version of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm, which allows the study of false memory forma...

The present study addresses the scope of the writing difficulties observed in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Patients with AD, patients with MCI and healthy controls performed a written picture-naming task and a direct copy transcoding task in which phonology-to-orthography (P–O) consistency was manipula...

Expressive reading is considered one of the subprocesses involved in reading fluency, and good readers show greater changes in tone and fewer unnecessary pauses than bad ones. Given the high frequency of reading difficulties in specific language impairment (SLI), there may be certain differences in the use of prosody among children with SLI. The pu...

This paper addresses the question of whether dyslexic children suffer from syntactic deficits that are independent of limitations with phonological processing. We looked at subject‐verb agreement errors after sentence subjects containing a second noun (the attractor) known to be able to attract incorrect agreement (e.g., “the owner(s) of the house(...

The impact of central on peripheral writing processes has been studied mainly in adults and children whose first language is a deep orthographic system. The results suggest that the influence varies according to age, but it also could depend on the orthographic system. The objective of the present work was to address the possible impact of the cent...

The contribution of two different training contexts to online, gradual lexical acquisition was investigated by event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by new, word-like stimuli. Pseudowords were repeatedly preceded by a picture representing a well-known object (semantic-associative training context) or by a hash mark (non-associative training cont...

Background: The expressive difficulties in patients with Alzheimer's dementia have been extensively studied, mainly in oral language. However, the deterioration of their writing processes has received much less attention. Objective: The present study aims to examine the decline of the performance of patients with Alzheimer's disease in both oral...

Orthographic learning is one of the steps needed to achieve reading fluency. There are different variables that could influence the formation of orthographic representations. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of the previous semantic and phonological knowledge on the formation of orthographic representations. We used a decrease of t...

There is currently an increasing interest in the acquisition of reading fluency. This is characterized as automated reading with higher rates of speed and accuracy that enables the reader to carry out processes of higher-level comprehension. A key factor in reading fluency is the establishment of word representations in the reader’s lexicon, which...

Background: Many pairs of words in Spanish, in particular many verbal forms, differ only in the syllable stressed, such as aNImo (I encourage) and aniMÓ (he encouraged). Consequently, word stress may acquire a lexical contrastive value that has been confi rmed by Dupoux, Pallier, Sebastian, and Mehler (1997) for Spanish speakers though not for Fren...

Several studies have found that, after repeated exposure to new words, children form orthographic representations that allow them to read those words faster and more fluently. However, these studies did not take into account variables related to the words. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of sublexical variables on the formati...

Reading prosody is considered one of the essential markers of reading fluency, alongside accuracy and speed. The aim of our study was to investigate how development of reading prosody in Spanish children varies with sentence type and length. We compared primary school children from the third and fifth grades with an adult sample. Participants were...

Introducción La lectura es una actividad compleja en la que intervienen varios procesos de manera totalmente sincronizada. Desde el modelo cognitivo, los principales mecanismos implicados son la identificación de las letras y los procesos de tipo léxico, sintáctico y semántico (Cuetos, 1990). Si bien el primero de ellos suele dominarse a la perfecc...

Introducción. Cada año un considerable número de niños presentan dificultades para aprender a leer, muchos de los cuales terminan en fracaso escolar. Esas dificultades pueden ser debidas a causas variadas como déficits sensoriales o intelectuales, trastornos emocionales, problemas socio-familiares, etc. Pero hay un porcentaje de entre el 3 y el 5%...

The aim of this study was to investigate the prosody abilities on top of phonological and visual abilities in children with dyslexia in Spanish that can be considered a syllable-timed language. The performances on prosodic tasks (prosodic perception, rise-time perception), phonological tasks (phonological awareness, rapid naming, verbal working mem...

Introduction: early detection of difficulties in learning to read and write is key to starting intervention programs as soon as possible. But to detect these difficulties it is necessary to have tools with proven efficiency. Aims: the objective of this study was to validate a test developed with linguistic tasks related to reading, applied three ye...

Reading impairment is an important feature in Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA). The Spanish orthography entails completely regular spelling to sound correspondences, so reading disorders may be different to English. In the current study, reading, phonological and semantic abilities of 35 patients with the three variants of PPA, and 13 healthy volu...

Aims. Morphological skills in Williams syndrome (WS) are a controversial issue, particularly cross-linguistically. Methods. We assessed pluralization patterns of nouns, inflection of verbs in the past, and gender assignment, inflection, and agreement within the noun phrase in a sample of Spanish-speaking children with WS compared to typically devel...

Reading predictors directly contribute to reading accuracy and speed. This study analyses the effect of an instructional programme aimed at improving two of these reading predictors, phonological awareness and naming speed. Participants were 326 children (171 in the experimental group and 155 in the control group) in grades second and third year pr...

Several studies performed on deep orthography systems reveal variables that influence writing latencies that occur over the course of learning. In transparent orthographies such as Spanish there are very few studies on writing that measure latencies and duration. The aim of this present study was to take a more in-depth look at knowledge of the wri...

Recent studies have suggested that Spanish children with dyslexia have difficulty storing orthographic representations of new words. But given that the syllable plays an important role in word recognition in Spanish, it is possible that the formation of orthographic representations is influenced by the characteristics of the syllables that make up...

Although several studies have found that the sublexical route of spelling has an effect on handwriting movements, the ability of lexical variables to modulate peripheral processes during writing is less clear. This study addresses the hypothesis that word frequency affects writing durations only during writing acquisition, and that at some point of...

Background: Many studies suggest oxidative stress as an early feature of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD).However, evidence of established oxidative stress in AD peripheral cells is still inconclusive, possibly due to both, differences in the type of samples and the heterogeneity of oxidative markers used in different studies. Objective: The aim of this s...

Do skilled readers of opaque and transparent orthographies make differential use of lexical and sublexical processes when converting words from print to sound? Two experiments are reported, which address that question, using effects of letter length on naming latencies as an index of the involvement of sublexical letter-sound conversion. Adult nati...

Parkinson disease is a neurodegenerative condition involving motor, cognitive, and linguistic deficits. It is important to know why all these different deficits co-occur in the affected people. This paper aims to clarify whether these comorbid deficits result from the selective impairment of a computational primitive, namely, a context-sensitive co...

Orthographic representations of words are indispensable for reading fluency. The ways in which these representations are developed and their resistance to decay are hotly debated topics. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of semantic and phonological representations on the formation of orthographic representations in a transpare...

Reading becomes expressive when word and text reading are quick, accurate and automatic. Recent studies have reported that skilled readers use greater pitch changes and fewer irrelevant pauses than poor readers. Given that developmental dyslexics have difficulty acquiring and automating the alphabetic code and developing orthographic representation...

The syntactic skills of Spanish-speaking children with Williams syndrome (WS) were assessed in different areas (phrase structure, recursion, and bound anaphora). Children were compared to typically-developing peers matched either in chronological age (CA-TD) or in verbal age (VA-TD). In all tasks children with WS performed significantly worse than...

Two opposing points of view have been presented with regard to the applicability of the dual-route reading models Spanish. Some authors maintain that, given the transparency of the reading system, non-lexical reading is the strategy followed predominantly by Spanish readers and for that reason these models are not appropriate to explain alexias (ac...

Reading becomes expressive when word and text reading are quick, accurate and automatic. Recent studies have reported that skilled readers use greater pitch changes and fewer irrelevant pauses than poor readers. Given that developmental dyslexics have difficulty acquiring and automating the alphabetic code and developing orthographic representation...

It is well recognized that mitochondrial dysfunction contributes to neurodegeneration occurring in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However, evidences of mitochondrial defects in AD peripheral cells are still inconclusive. Here, some mitochondrial-encoded and nuclear-encoded proteins, involved in maintaining the correct mitochondria machine, were investig...

This study explores the time-course of word processing by grammatical class (verbs vs. nouns) and meaning (action vs. non-action) by means of an ERP experiment. The morphology of Spanish words allows for a noun (e.g., bail-e [a dance]) or a verb (e.g., bail-ar [to dance]) to be formed by simply changing the suffix attached to the root. This facilit...

El PROLEC-SE-R es una batería de trece pruebas para evaluar y detectar dificultades lectoras en adolescentes de 12 a 18 años (de 1.º de ESO a 2.º de Bachillerato). Su aplicación permite obtener información sobre los tres principales procesos de la lectura a estas edades: procesos léxicos, sintácticos y semánticos.

The human motor cortex is involved in the planning and execution of movements as well as in the processing of action language, and it is impaired in Parkinson's disease (PD) as a consequence of dopamine degeneration. The aim of this study is to understand the role of dopamine in the processing of action words by looking at PD patients with and with...

Understanding a written text requires some higher cognitive abilities that not all children have. Some children have these abilities, since they understand oral texts; however, they have difficulties with written texts, probably due to problems in reading fluency. The aim of this study was to determine which aspects of reading fluency are related t...

Word reading fluency is a key component in the process of reading. In order to understand its acquisition it is crucial to conduct longitudinal studies. The aim of this work was to describe the development of word recognition in Spanish, considering accuracy and speed, from a longitudinal perspective. A group of 31 children were followed for six ye...

Introduction: Parkinson disease is a neurodegenerative condition involving motor, cognitive, and linguistic deficits. It is important to know why all these different deficits co-occur in the affected people. This paper aims to clarify whether these comorbid deficits result from the selective impairment of a computational primitive, namely, a conte...

Impairments of word recognition in Alzheimer's disease (AD) have been less widely investigated than impairments affecting word retrieval and production. In particular, we know little about what makes individual words easier or harder for patients with AD to recognize. We used a lexical selection task in which participants were shown sets of four it...

Introducción: el diagnóstico de la dislexia se suele producir varios años después de que se inicie el aprendizaje de la lectoescritura. Para entonces muchos niños disléxicos ya saben lo que es el fracaso escolar y la pérdida de autoestima. Con un diagnóstico temprano se pueden evitar muchos de esos problemas. Además los programas de intervención so...

NEUROBEL (Neuropsychological assessment of language in adults) is a brief battery that allows a screening of the basic processes of language comprehension and production. It consists of 8 tasks, assessing oral-language processing from the theoretical model of cognitive neuropsychology. The aim has been to carry out a pilot study of initial normativ...

Spelling deficits have repeatedly been observed in children with dyslexia. However, the few studies addressing this issue in dyslexic adults have reported contradictory results. We investigated whether Spanish dyslexics show spelling deficits in adulthood and which components of the writing production process might be impaired in developmental dysl...

Recent studies show that dyslexia persists into adulthood, even in highly educated and well-read people. The main characteristic that adults with dyslexia present is a low speed when reading. In Spanish, a shallow orthographic system, no studies about adults with dyslexia are available; and it is possible that the consistency of the orthographic sy...

Recent studies show that dyslexia persists into adulthood, even in highly educated and well-read people. The main characteristic that adults with dyslexia present is a low speed when reading. In Spanish, a shallow orthographic system, no studies about adults with dyslexia are available; and it is possible that the consistency of the orthographic sy...

Un aspecto clave para la intervención educativa específica es la detección temprana de niños con riesgo de dislexia. En este trabajo presentamos una sencilla tarea conductual de asociación de voces (modalidad auditiva) con avatares (modalidad visual), en la que las personas con dislexia muestran un rendimiento más bajo que las personas normo-lector...

Introduction: the diagnosis of dyslexia usually occurs several years after the literacy learning begins. By then, many dyslexic children have faced academic failure and loss of self-esteem. An early diagnosis could avoid many of these problems. Furthermore, intervention programs are more effective when applied early. Objectives: the aim of this stu...

Expone los principales temas de la psicología del lenguaje, ahondando en los conceptos básicos de la disciplina, los niveles de comprensión oral y escrita, la producción oral del lenguaje y la lectura, así como los trastornos propios del lenguaje. http://www.medicapanamericana.com/Libros/Libro/5432/Psicologia-del-Lenguaje.html

Semantic memory decline and changes of default mode network (DMN) connectivity have been reported in mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Only a few studies, however, have investigated the role of changes of activity in the DMN on semantic memory in this clinical condition. The present study aimed to investigate more extensively the relationship betwee...