Development of the Persian syntax comprehension test

Abstract

ObjectivesLack of formal tests to assess the various dimension of language in Persian is one of the main challenges of speech and language pathologists in Iran. The purpose of this study was to develop a Persian Syntax Comprehension Test to assess the syntax comprehension in Persian speaking children aged 4–10 years old. Methodsthe study included four phases. In the first phase, syntactic structures of Persian were extracted and then, items generation was performed. In the second phase, content validity was determined and images were designed for the items. In the third phase, two pilot studies were carried out and difficulty and discrimination indices for items were determined and in the last phase, 788 typically-developing children (436 children aged 4–6 and 352 children aged 6–10 years old) and 15 children with Developmental language disorder were recruited then, psychometric properties (construct and concurrent validity, test-retest, and split-half reliability) were evaluated. In the final step, standard score and percentile were calculated. We used Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, version 24.0 (SPSS, Inc., Chicago, IL) for the statistical analysis of the data. The significance level was (P < 0.05). ResultsFinal version of Persian syntax comprehension test contains 24 syntactic structures and 96 items. Items' Difficulty indices were between 0.33 and 0.90. There was a significant difference among the age groups for the mean total score of the Persian syntax comprehension test. In addition, a high correlation existed between total scores of this test and those of grammar understanding subtest of Test of langue development (r = 0.52, P < 0.001). The correlation of total Persian syntax comprehension test score of the two rounds of test performance and the split-half coefficient were estimated to be 0.56 and 0.85, respectively. ConclusionIt seems that the Persian Syntax comprehension test has satisfactory values for the reliability and validity measures, and it can be used as a suitable instrument by researchers and clinicians.