The PraxiFala Battery: A diagnostic accuracy study

Abstract

Purpose

To present the sensitivity and specificity and establish cutoff points (receiver operating characteristic [ROC] curve) for the PraxiFala Battery.

Method

The sample included 308 Brazilian-speaking children aged 3;0–7;11. Twenty-one children had motor speech disorders (MSD), 58 children had phonological disorder (PD), and 229 had typical speech (TS) development. Participants were administered the PraxiFala Battery, which contains verbal (word and sentence production), nonverbal (orofacial praxis), and diadochokinetic tasks. The sensitivity and specificity of items in each task were then calculated using ROC curves.

Result

Total scores on the verbal (word production), nonverbal (orofacial praxis), and diadochokinetic tasks had good sensitivity and specificity. The only scores with poor sensitivity and specificity in differentiating between TS, PD, and MSD were consistency and prosody in the verbal tasks (sentence production), and item /ta/ in the diadochokinetic task. Area under the ROC curve (AUC) values were greater than 0.7 for most items in the comparison between TS vs. MSD and PD vs. MSD. AUC values were poor or fair among children with TS and PD, suggesting that this instrument may not be accurate in identifying these groups.

Conclusion

The verbal, nonverbal, and diadochokinetic tasks in the PraxiFala Battery had good sensitivity and specificity.

Keywords:

• test validity
• psychometrics
• childhood apraxia of speech
• motor speech disorders
• children

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).