Development of a speech production test in Azeri Turkish speaking children

Abstract

Due to the lack of appropriate tests for the assessment of speech sounds of Azeri Turkish speaking children, the present study aimed to develop and validate a single word test. A total of 150 typically developing children were recruited in the study (30 children for investigating the name agreement and 120 children to establish construct validity). In the first step, a test with 31 items was developed in terms of suggested criteria in the literature including word frequency, word length, syllabic structure, familiarity, and picturability of words. Then, we asked the expert panel’s opinion for the test items. The value of the content validity ratio for each target word was 1.00 except for one item. To administer the test, we asked the participants to name images. Name agreement of the items was determined through administrating the test. The percentages for the indices of name agreement were 87.68 and 0.17, respectively. The findings of the item-by-item test–retest and inter-rater reliability showed satisfactory values in terms of consonants in the initial and final positions. Also, the value of the internal consistency was calculated to be kr = 0.78 (p < 0.001). The psychometric properties of this scale with 31 items proved that it is appropriate for quantifying the speech sound production in Azeri Turkish typically developing children.

Keywords:

• Azeri Turkish
• reliability
• speech sound disorder
• test
• validity

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the children and their parents who cooperated in the current study. Also, the authors express their gratitude to the staff of the Social Welfare Organization and nursery schools of the city of Tabriz. The present study was driven from a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Science in Speech Therapy by the first author.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no conflict of interest to declare.