Validation of the Intelligibility in Context Scale for school students in Fiji

ABSTRACT

Fiji is a multilingual nation with few assessment tools addressing children’s communication. This article describes the validation of the Intelligibility in Context Scale for Fiji English, Standard Fijian, and Fiji Hindi. Informants were caregivers of 65 typically developing multilingual children (aged 5;3–10;5) attending a Fiji primary school. The students spoke an average of 2.9 languages (range = 1–5). Their main language was Standard Fijian (41.5%), Fiji Hindi (23.1%), Fiji English (20.0%), or Fijian dialect (15.4%). An ICS mean score of 4.6 was obtained for main language (ICS-ML) and 4.4 for Fiji English (ICS-FE) indicating that students were usually to always intelligible. There were no significant differences between main language, number of languages spoken, gender, age, or socio-economic status. Both scales had good internal consistency, but were not correlated with speech accuracy measures possibly due to ceiling effects. Further validation with younger children is recommended. The ICS may be a useful tool for Fiji with comparative results to other international studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Assessment
• Fiji
• intelligibility
• Intelligibility in Context Scale
• speech

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the Fijian community, particularly Mrs. Sala Sauqaqa, the Fiji Ministry of Education Heritage and Arts, and ICS translators Dr. Paul Geraghty and Mr. Salesh Kumar of The University of the South Pacific. We also thank Dr. Cen Wang, of Charles Sturt University, for her helpful comments on a late draft of the article, and Nicole Limbrick for her assistance with reliability.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Funding

This research was supported in part by an Australian government Endeavour Post-graduate Research Scholarship and an Australian Linguistic Society Gerhardt Laves scholarship.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by an Australian government Endeavour Post-graduate Research Scholarship and an Australian Linguistic Society Gerhardt Laves scholarship.