Words for clinical use in speech-language pathology in Brazilian portuguese-speaking children: a focus on familiarity and representativeness from expert judges.
Yanela Paola Jaimes Parada, Vitor Cantele Malavolta, Denis Altieri de Oliveira Moraes and 2 others
PMID 42561301WHAT IT FOUND
Twenty-one judges rated 480 candidate words and 146 were kept for a word bank targeting Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children aged 18-36 months.
It is a selection of words, not a test of whether using them changes a child's progress.
Key findings
01A word bank of 146 words was selected for Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children aged 18-36 months, drawn from an initial list of 480 words taken from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory.
02A word was retained only if its mean familiarity rating exceeded 2.5 on a 5-point scale (1 = not familiar to 5 = extremely familiar) and its mean representativeness rating exceeded 0.2 on a 2-point scale (1 = yes, drawable; 2 = no).
03The authors state the selected words may serve as stimuli for phonological, narrative, and augmentative and alternative communication assessment and intervention strategies.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The judges are a small panel of 21 people, and only 13 rated representativeness, so the 'consensus' rests on a very thin base. The word list comes from the CDI, which was originally normed on a different population; the judges rated familiarity from their own experience, not from a sample of 18-36-month-old children. No independent replication or test-retest of the selection process is reported; the 146-word list is the authors' single output. The paper does not report how many of the 480 words were dropped at each threshold, so you cannot see how close a word was to being excluded. The representativeness scale is binary (drawable / not drawable), which is a coarse measure of whether a word can be used as a visual or tactile stimulus.
Declared interests
No financial support or conflicts of interest declared.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the 146-word list as evidence that using familiar words in therapy improves a child's language outcomes. This study selected words by expert and parent judgment; it did not compare a treatment group with a control group, did not measure a child's progress, and did not test whether these words produce better results than any other set of age-appropriate words.