Preliminary study of a Digital Brazilian Portuguese Speech Assessment Instrument: validity and reliability of imitation and naming tasks

TL;DR

This study evaluates the validity and reliability of a digital tool for assessing speech in Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children.

Contribution

The study provides evidence for the validity and reliability of naming and imitation tasks in a digital speech assessment tool.

Findings

The naming task showed satisfactory construct validity.

The imitation task had moderate to nearly perfect correlations.

The tasks effectively discriminated between children with and without phonological disorder.

Abstract

To evaluate the psychometric properties of the naming and imitation tasks of the Digital Speech Assessment Instrument.

Forty-five Brazilian Portuguese (BP)-speaking children aged 4 to 9 years, with and without Phonological Disorder (PD) participated in the study. Construct validity was verified by convergent validity, criterion validity was analyzed using Student's t-test for independent samples, and inter-rater reliability was assessed.

The naming task demonstrated satisfactory construct validity. In the imitation task, correlations ranged from moderate to nearly perfect. Both tasks discriminated well between groups, with children with PD presenting consistently lower scores. Inter-rater agreement was substantial to nearly perfect.

The results indicate that the naming and imitation tasks of the Digital Speech Assessment Instrument are valid and reliable.