[Development of a picture receptive vocabulary test and evaluation of its validity and reliability for normal 36-71 months Persian children]

ABSTRACT

Vocabulary assessment is one of the most important screening indexes and language evaluation. Receptive vocabulary has a strong correlation with verbal intelligence and it is a strong predictor of children future academic achievement specially in reading comprehension. The goal of the current study was to develop a picture receptive vocabulary test and to evaluate its validity and reliability for normal 30-71 months Persian children. The type of this study is test construction which was conducted in descriptive- analytic method. In this study, 91 normal Persian children aged between 30 and 71 months in 7 age groups, with a 6- month-age interval participated. For developing Persian picture receptive vocabulary test, words were extracted from books and dissertations which were related to our study, afterward one picture was selected for each word. In order to consider selected picture validity, test with a questionnaire was sent for professional speech and language pathologists. At the end, final edition of the test was administered to 7 age groups. Test retest reliability and correlation between A half and B half were calculated using Spearman Rank- order correlation. In order to consider the effect of age on total scores, Kruskal Wallis test was administered and to investigate the relation between gender and total scores independent sample t test was applied. The results of this study indicated that Persian picture receptive vocabulary test is valid and reliable. [CVI=1], test retest reliability=0.81 and split- half reliability =0.91 .This study provided evidence that there is a significant difference [p=0/000] between different age groups scores, and there is no significant difference [p=0.08] in total scores between genders. Persian picture receptive vocabulary test can show differences in vocabulary comprehension ability in the study age groups