The Adaptation of Developmental Sentence Scoring and Index of Productive Syntax to Turkish.

Abstract

Language sampling analysis (LSA) plays an important role in evaluating language skills; hence, the study aimed to develop new assessment measures for the LSA in Turkish as alternatives to mean length of utterance (MLU) and the Language Assessment, Remediation and Screening Procedure. With this aim, Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS) and the Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) were adapted to Turkish. Eighty monolingual Turkish children were included in the study, and the age range was from 2;0 to 5;11 (years;months). The children were grouped with 6-month intervals, and each group had an equal number of participants in terms of gender. Their general and language development were tested with standardized tests, and language sampling was recorded during play with farm toys for 15-20 min. Reviewing literature and observing participants' production schemas were created for DSS for Turkish (DSS-TR) and the IPSyn for Turkish (IPSyn-TR) separately, and final versions were determined in consultation with experts. DSS-TR and IPSyn-TR were significantly correlated with standardized tests, and MLU values were statistically significant (p < .05). Total scores increased with age; however, grammatical categories did not go up. No difference was observed between genders (p > .05). In DSS-TR, the "sentence point" did not affect the participants' total scores because of language characteristics (p > .05). Finally, DSS-TR and IPSyn-TR were seen to be correlated with each other (p < .05). DSS-TR and IPSyn-TR are valid, being correlated with other assessment tools, and reliable, showing a high correlation with other raters, to reflect morphosyntactic skills. Therefore, they both are alternative assessment measures that will be used in LSA and give an opportunity to clinicians to plan their intervention goals. Also, they enable clinicians to observe progress not only specific to grammatical category but also in the total scores of the children either during or at the end of the therapy.