Assessing Phonemic Fluency in Multilingual Contexts: Letter Selection Methodology and Demographically Stratified Norms for Three South African Language Groups

Abstract

Because of their global clinical utility, phonemic fluency tests are frequently incorporated into neuropsychological assessment batteries. However, in heterogeneous societies their use is complicated by the lack of careful attention to using letters of equivalent difficulty across languages, and the paucity of norms stratified by relevant sociodemographic variables. In accordance with the International Test Commission's guidelines for adaptation of test material in multilingual contexts, this study provides (1) an internationally replicable methodological template for selecting appropriate letter sets; (2) empirical evidence to substantiate the equivalence of a letter set across three languages; (3) a template for evaluating the relative impact of sociodemographic variables on phonemic fluency; and (4) appropriately stratified norms for the letter set SBL (English and Afrikaans) / IBL (Xhosa) in a sample (N = 512) of urban participants (7–25 years with 1–17 years of education) from the Cape Town region of the Western Cape province of South Africa.

Keywords:

• cross-cultural comparison
• education
• executive function
• language
• neuropsychological tests

Notes

Each participant's most recent official school report card was used to ascertain achievement level (expressed in percentages) in their first language.

Because of the inequitable allocation of human and material resources in favor of white education systems (e.g., colored and black schools were allocated 43% and 4%, respectively, of the funds allocated to white schools; Corke, 1984), wide disparities in quality of education were entrenched during the Apartheid era. Since democratization, extreme interracial socioeconomic disparities have remained and intraracial discrepancies have emerged, opening up access to better educational facilities for the financially privileged but not for the majority of the population (Monteiro, 2008; Urbach, 2007). Despite some attempts to redress the imbalances of the past, including the implementation of a new education system, the cumulative effects of discrepant quality of education in the context of dire socioeconomic deprivation has persisted since desegregation, resulting in profound educational underachievement and high rates of functional illiteracy in many South African children (Botha & Hite, 2000; Statistics South Africa, 2011; van der Berg, 2002; van der Berg & Burger, 2003).

A qualitative profile of typically disadvantaged schools (in comparison with advantaged schools) could be described as follows: (1) geographic location within poorer areas with lower levels of safety (due to higher levels of interpersonal crime, gangsterism, drug abuse, and vandalism); (2) allocation of fewer human resources (higher learner-educator ratios, higher levels of classroom overcrowding, lower qualified and salaried staff, poorer proficiency of educators in language of instruction, higher absenteeism rates for educators and learners); (3) allocation of fewer material resources (fewer books, computers, teacher aids; poorly equipped libraries and science laboratories); (4) fewer extracurricular resources (fewer facilities and less manpower for extra-mural resources and extension subjects, e.g., arts, additional languages, computer studies); and (5) poorer educational outcomes (earlier school drop-out rates, higher incidence of teenage pregnancies, lower pass rates at Grade 7 and Grade 12 levels, and lower university admission rates).