Development of a tablet application for the screening of receptive vocabulary skills in multilingual children: A pilot study (original) (raw)
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Word comprehension and multilingualism among toddlers: A study using touch screens in daycares
2016
Most previous research on young infants’ spoken word comprehension has focused on monolinguals. These results may not generalize to non-monolingual populations because lexical processing may be more intricate for infants exposed to more than one language. Do toddlers learning multiple languages recognize words similarly to their monolingual peers? Answering this question will require extensive efforts, to which we contribute word comprehension data collected through a procedure aiming to be both precise and ecological. French-learning toddlers (N = 38; age range 1;11-3;4) were tested in their daycare, using a French-spoken promptto-picture matching task implemented on a child-friendly touch screen. Our results document some differences in accuracy, but not response time or number of trials completed, among toddlers differing in the number of languages they routinely hear. Additionally, these data suggest that it is feasible to collect good quality data from multiple children tested ...
Validation of an Expressive and Receptive Tablet Assessment of Early Literacy
Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 2019
Touch screen tablets are used in the classroom for assessment. Little is known about the psychometric properties of tablet based assessments. This study examined the validity and reliability of an expressive and receptive assessment app designed to measure literacy skills. Children (N = 45; 3-5 years) completed the app assessments for alphabet and word skills using a tablet. Children (N = 15) were post-tested 1 to 2 weeks later to check test score stability. The tablet measures showed good internal consistency (all α > .90) and test-retest reliability (ICC range = .87 to .98). Agreement between scores for the tablet and paper-based tests was also high (ICC range = .91 to .98). This indicates that expressive and receptive tablet tests provide valid and reliable measures.
Physical Treatments: Specific Physical Therapy Journal (PTJ), 2022
Background and Objectives: Measuring children's receptive vocabulary skills requires the use of valid and reliable tools. This study aims to assess the reliability of the receptive picture vocabulary test for Persian-speaking children (RPVT-P). Methods: In the first phase of this cross-sectional, descriptive, and analytical study, 434 normal children aged 30 to 71 months participated. In the second phase of the study, 2 groups participated, 16 children with Down syndrome (DS) a mentally age-matched typically developing (TD) peers. The internal consistency (Cronbach's α coefficient), construct validity, and discriminant validity of the RPVT-P was evaluated. Results: Cronbach's α was calculated as 0.825, indicating good internal consistency for the total score of the RPVT-P. The Spearman correlation coefficient of 0.83 showed a positive correlation between age and the total score of the RPVT-P (P=0.0000). The correlation between most of the subtest scores and the total score of the RPVT-P was found from 0.70 to 0.87, showing acceptable construct validity. A significant difference was observed between the DS and TD groups for the total scores of the RPVT-P (P=0.0000), indicating good discriminant validity of the RPVT-P. Conclusion: The RPVT-P is a test with acceptable validity and reliability to determine the ability of preschool Persian-speaking children in receptive vocabulary.
Adapting a receptive vocabulary test for preschool-aged Greek-speaking children
International journal of language & communication disorders / Royal College of Speech & Language Therapists
Receptive vocabulary is an important measure for language evaluations. Therefore, norm-referenced receptive vocabulary tests are widely used in several languages. However, a receptive vocabulary test has not yet been normed for Modern Greek. To adapt an American English vocabulary test, the Receptive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test-II (ROWPVT-II), for Modern Greek for use with Greek-speaking preschool children. The list of 170 English words on ROWPVT-II was adapted by (1) developing two lists (A and B) of Greek words that would match either the target English word or another concept corresponding to one of the pictured objects in the four-picture array; and (2) determining a developmental order for the chosen Greek words for preschool-aged children. For the first task, adult word frequency measures were used to select the words for the Greek wordlist. For the second task, 427 children, 225 boys and 202 girls, ranging in age from 2;0 years to 5;11 years, were recruited from urban an...
International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 2018
Touch screen tablets are being increasingly used in schools for learning and assessment. However, the validity and reliability of assessments delivered via tablets are largely unknown. The present study tested the psychometric properties of a tablet-based app designed to measure early literacy skills. Tablet-based tests were also compared with traditional paper-based tests. Children aged 2-6 years (N = 99) completed receptive tests delivered via a tablet for letter, word, and numeral skills. The same skills were tested with a traditional paper-based test that used an expressive response format. Children (n = 35) were post-tested 8 weeks later to examine the stability of test scores over time. The tablet test scores showed high internal consistency (all α's > .94), acceptable test-retest reliability (ICC range = .39-.89), and were correlated with child age, family SES, and home literacy teaching to indicate good predictive validity. The agreement between scores for the tablet and traditional tests was high (ICC range = .81-.94). The tablet tests provides valid and reliable measures of children's early literacy skills. The strong psychometric properties and ease of use suggests that tablet-based tests of literacy skills have the potential to improve assessment practices for research purposes and classroom use.
American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 2014
Purpose The authors examined the effects of conceptual scoring on the performance of simultaneous and sequential bilinguals on standardized receptive and expressive vocabulary measures in English and Spanish. Method Participants included 40 English-speaking monolingual children, 39 simultaneous Spanish–English bilingual children, and 19 sequential bilingual children, ages 5–7. The children completed standardized receptive and expressive vocabulary measures in English and also in Spanish for those who were bilingual. After the standardized administration, bilingual children were given the opportunity to respond to missed items in their other language to obtain a conceptual score. Results Controlling for group differences in socioeconomic status (SES), both simultaneous and sequential bilingual children scored significantly below monolingual children on single-language measures of English receptive and expressive vocabulary. Conceptual scoring removed the significant difference betwee...
Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 2019
The number of children speaking more than one language as well as the number of languages spoken in Ireland has increased significantly posing a problem for timely identification of children with language disorder. The current study aims to profile performance of monolingual and multilingual children on language processing tasks: non-word repetition (NWR) and sentence repetition (SR). We used: (1) Crosslinguistic (CL) and English Language-Specific (LS) NWR and (2) SR in English, Polish and Russian. Children's socioeconomic status, language emergence, the age of exposure (AoE) to English and the percentage of English spoken at home were recorded. The study included 88 children age 5-8 attending a school in a disadvantaged area. CL and LS NWR yielded similar distribution of scores for monolinguals and multilinguals. The tasks identified small number of children who performed significantly lower than the mean while there were no significant differences between the groups. In English SR, monolinguals significantly outperformed multilinguals. Comparison of SR in English and Polish/Russian indicated that some children showed balanced performance in both of their languages while others showed marked differences performing better in either Polish/Russian or English depending on their AoE to English and percentage of English spoken at home. The pilot study suggests that CL-NWR is a promising screening tool for identifying monolingual and multilingual children with language disorder while SR provides more detailed information on children's language performance relative to their language exposure. SR task is recommended to be used only if comparable tasks are available in all of children's languages.
International Journal of Bilingualism
Purpose: As a contribution to the complex task of developing appropriate tools for language assessment in bilingual children, the current paper investigates whether direct and indirect measures of language skills paint a similar picture of children's multilingual language competence. Approach: Emerging from the recent COST Action IS0804 (Bi-SLI), the study used two new tools from the battery Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS): the direct assessment tool Crosslinguistic Lexical Tasks (CLT) and the parental report Parents of Bilingual Children Questionnaire (PaBiQ), offering an indirect measure of overall language skills. Data and Analysis: The participants were 36 children of Polish immigrants to Norway or the UK. Correlations were investigated with Kendall's rank correlation, and group comparisons carried out with Wilcoxon rank sum tests. Findings: The direct and indirect measures correlated. There were no group differences on the direct measure, but the parents in the UK still judged their children as less proficient in Polish than the parents in Norway did. Two different accounts for this incongruity are discussed: First, parents in the UK may set higher benchmarks for their children's minority language skills than the parents in Norway. Alternative accounts of this interpretation related to differences in the parents' socio-economic background, proficiency or language attitudes are discussed. Second, parental reports may indicate early stages of attrition of the minority language among the children in the UK that the direct lexical assessment tool may not be sensitive enough to uncover. Originality: The study used two new tools designed specifically for multilingual children -comparing two groups of children of a recent and growing immigration group, whose language development is currently underinvestigated. Implications: The findings underscore the complexity of assessing bilingual children's full language competence. The cross-cultural differences documented here call for further longitudinal research systematically comparing immigrant children from different language backgrounds.