The Development and Validation of an Auditory Perception Test in Spanish for Hispanic Children Receiving Reading Instruction in Spanish

Abstract

In view of the apparent absence of an auditory perception test in Spanish for Hispanic children that could be related to reading performance in Spanish, an attempt was made to develop and to validate a 32-item measure entitled La Prueba de Analisis Auditivo (PAA) by replicating for a sample of 158 Latino children whose primary or dominant language was Spanish, the 1971 study by Rosner and Simon, who for a group of Anglo children had developed an auditory perception measure entitled Auditory Analysis Test (AAT) and validated it against standardized tests in reading and language arts. The psychometric data of the investigation indicated for the sample of 158 Latino pupils in kindergarten and in grades one, two, and three in a suburban elementary school in a lower middle-class neighborhood that (a) the higher the grade equivalent placement in a criterion-referenced Spanish reading measure entitled SOBER, the higher was the average level of performance in the PAA measure, (b) the presence of substantial variation in the difficulty index of a given item across SOBER grade equivalent reading levels and in difficulty indices of several items within a specified SOBER reading level affords a means for studying developmental changes in auditory perceptual skills and for identifying strengths and weaknesses in these skills, (c) the PAA measure yields relatively high internal-consistency and test-retest estimates of reliability for subsamples of Hispanic children classified as falling at different reading placement levels as determined by the SOBER test, and (d) the concurrent and predictive validity of the PAA measure relative to the SOBER test as the criterion variable appears to be promising.