The National Adult Reading Test (NART)(Nelson and O'Connell, 1978), and other English language reading tests (Jastak and Wilkinson, 1984; Uttl, 2002) have become widely used as a means of estimating premorbid IQ in schizophrenia, where a higher value than current IQ is a typical finding (eg Weickert et al., 2000). Such tests examine the ability to read aloud words which do not follow the rules of English pronunciation; being able read a word correctly implies that the person knows (or once knew) the meaning of the word, and this skill tends to be preserved even when knowledge of the word has been lost due to disease. Spanish differs from English in that the pronunciation of all words can be deduced from their spelling; where there are deviations from standard rules of pronunciation these are signaled by an accent. Del Ser et al.(1997) took advantage of this to develop the Word Accentuation Test (Test de Acentuaci�n de Palabras, TAP), which requires pronunciation of 30 low frequency Spanish words whose accents have been removed. The test showed good reliability in a sample of 81 normal elderly participants. However, the original and later similar tests (Burin et al., 2000; Krueger et al., 2006; Schrauf et al., 2006) have not been fully validated against the WAIS. Specifically, no study has calculated a formula for converting the TAP score into an estimated IQ. We administered the TAP to 103 healthy Spanish adults (57m, 46f, mean age 39.21, range18 to 65) made up of nonmedical hospital staff, their relatives and acquaintances, and other sources in the community. They were questioned and excluded if they reported a history of mental illness, treatment with psychotropic medication, brain trauma/neurological disease, reading disorder or learning disability. The TAP was administered by one of three psychologists who had previously jointly rated N10 individuals until they were consistent in scoring. All participants were also given five subtests of the WAIS III (Vocabulary, Similarities, Matrix Reasoning, Block Design and Digit Span).

The participants' mean prorated WAIS III full scale IQ (FSIQ) was 99.86 (SD 13.00, range 71 to 126). Using studentized residual (SDRESID) values, 7 outlier participants were detected (SDRESID N2). A regression model in the remaining 96 participants using FSIQ as the dependent variable and TAP score as the predictor yielded the following values: r2=. 57;