Enhancing online speech and language assessment: Item development for the remote adult language experiment (ReAL-E) tool.
Hope Sparks Lancaster, Ryan Parks, Seth Bashford and 2 others
PMID 39889308WHAT IT FOUND
The new online ReAL-E tool showed good reliability for five of seven speech and language tasks in 25 adults, but real and nonword repetition had poor reliability.
It is currently only suitable for small-scale research, not clinical diagnosis.
Key findings
01Five of the seven tasks demonstrated good or excellent reliability, while real word and nonword repetition showed fair and poor reliability respectively.
02Participants performed within expected ranges for most tasks, but accuracy was lower than anticipated for nonword repetition and timed nonword reading.
03The tool is currently under development and is only ready for small-scale research studies focused on psychometrics, not for broader clinical or research use.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The pilot sample was very small (25 adults), which limits the stability of reliability and validity estimates. Many participants (50 of 75) were excluded from the pilot due to fraudulent activity flags, raising questions about data quality in unsupervised online testing. The tool is still in early development; it has not undergone item reduction, factor extraction, or large-scale validation. Reliability estimates for real and nonword repetition were poor, suggesting these specific tasks need significant refinement before they are usable. The study used a 'one-gate' design recruiting from the general population, so it is unclear how the tool performs specifically in adults with diagnosed developmental communication disorders.
Declared interests
The authors declare no conflict of interest. The study was funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the good reliability in five tasks as evidence that the ReAL-E is ready for clinical assessment. The tool is explicitly described as only suitable for small-scale research, and two core speech repetition tasks had poor reliability.