(Phonological processing in preschool children. Test standardisation).

摘要

BACKGROUND: We recently proposed test material for the purpose of testing phonological processing. While data regarding validity and reliability could already be established, normative data for preschool children are lacking. MATERIAL AND METHODS: A total of 203 preschool children aged 5.0-5.11 years participated in the study. Low level phonological processing was tested using minimal pairs for both words and non-words (logatoms). The items were chosen with respect to age-appropriate vocabulary, phoneme features, phoneme contrast and phoneme position. RESULTS: Our results indicate that overall test results follow a normal distribution. In contrast, the test subscales exhibited a skew. However, no significant ceiling effect was observed. There were no significant gender differences but differences among mono- versus bilingually raised children. DISCUSSION: As predicted from previous results and calculations our data now confirm a distribution following a Gaussian curve. Thus, one important prerequisite for using this test material for clinical purposes has been met. This material can now be applied for preschool children and individual raw scores may be transformed to percentile ranks. Ceiling effects of individual subscales can be explained by each specific level of difficulty.