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
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
1A 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.
2A 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).
3The authors state the selected words may serve as stimuli for phonological, narrative, and augmentative and alternative communication assessment and intervention strategies.
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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.
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