Effects of puberty on the development of expressive language assessed by automatized mensuration of oral production

Abstract

In early adolescence there are brain transformations associated with pubertal development that result in cognitive maturation, that is also affected by socioeconomic status (SES). Rarely, however, puberty is considered a factor in this maturation, usually assessed by effects of chronological age with laboratory testing in medium/high SES populations from developed countries. We intend to evaluate the effect of pubertal/chronological development and effect of SES on cognition with an ecological measure: linguistic variables from oral productions. The study will be cross-sectional in a convenience sample from FAPESP Thematic Project 2016/14750-0: 300 9 to 15 year olds with typical development (age in which puberty occurs) of both sexes and from various SES contexts. They will perform an oral fable retelling task, the transcription of which will be used to generate 180 metrics indicative oral expression, obtained from the free Coh-Metrix Port computerized tool. The metrics will then be reduced to major components. In order to identify the maturation of oral production aspects in this age group and the factors that influence it, effects of gender, SES, age or puberty will be analyzed for each component. The convergent validity of the measurements will be established by the relationship between the main components and scores indicative intelligence measured with the abbreviated Wechsler Intelligence scale. Thus, it will be possible to identify the effectiveness of these ecological ways of assessing cognition and demographic/pubertal factors that affect it. (AU)