Comparing Online and Face-to-Face Administration of the Polish Sentence Repetition Task in Monolingual and Multilingual Children: Higher Scores in Face-to-Face Testing.

The online and face-to-face sessions were not identical: the face-to-face session included additional tests and was longer, while the online session contained only the repetition task. The multilingual group was highly heterogeneous in terms of language exposure and country of residence. The sample was skewed toward higher socio-economic status and families comfortable with technology, which may limit generalisability. Researchers did not formally measure child attention or motivation during the sessions, so differences in engagement between formats cannot be ruled out. The study design allows comparison between modalities for the same child, but the order effect in multilingual children complicates the interpretation of the face-to-face advantage.

Funded by the National Science Centre, Poland. The authors declared no conflicts of interest.

Do not assume that a drop in a child’s sentence repetition score when moving from in-person to online testing indicates a decline in language ability. The format itself affects performance, and for multilingual children, the order of testing can cause scores to rise simply due to practice effects.