| The study of language comprehension assessment for children with special needs has always been the hot topics of language therapy. Language assessment tools have been developed quickly in the last decade at home and abroad. However, they could not completely meet language therapy for children with special needs. There are some deficiencies among them, such as the assessment can’t real-time monitor the training effect. It is the basic premise of effective therapy that connecting assessment with training will be offered for special children to develop their language ability.Objective:1. To develop a Receptive Content Words Assessment (RCWA) tool with the function of real-time monitoring training effect for special children with language disorders.2. To establish reference standards of RCWA for3to5years old children in Shanghai.3. To verify the reliability and validity of RCWA, and clinical application value for special children’s language therapy.Methods:1. The study of preliminarily established special children’s receptive content words test is based on the study of preschool children’s characteristics of the content words development, including choosing test vocabulary, editing pictures or video of expressing vocabularies, designing test procedures, and scoring etc.2. To put forward the new test methods for receptive content words by analyzing the defects of existing vocabulary picture tests. To find out the optimal test method of receptive verb through comparing advantages and disadvantages between picture vocabulary test and video vocabulary test. To find out the optimal noun methods of assessing receptive noun by comparing advantages and disadvantages among the number of options in picture vocabulary test.3. By evaluating316normal children’s with2years7months to5years2mouths, RCWA has developed the reference standards in Shanghai of China. The study would verify the reliability and validity.4. To explore characteristics of content words development of special children with hearing impairment or mental retardation by the open mode of RCWA, and to analyze the effectiveness of RCWA for the special children.Results:1. The RCWA are constructed by receptive noun picture test (RNPT), receptive verb video test (RVVT) and receptive adjective picture test (RAPT). The test vocabulary of RNPT mainly includes abstract nouns and concrete nouns which refer to somebody or something. The content words of RVVT are the action verbs. RAPT includes external characteristic adjectives, properties adjectives, body feeling adjectives, character behavior, event scene adjectives and emotional adjectives.2. According to the experimental results, the assessment method of selecting one or two from four word pictures test is better than that of selecting three from four in RNPT. The method of video vocabulary test is better than that of the picture vocabulary test in RVVT. The probability of unrepeated form is significant before and after RCWA (p<0.001).3.(1) Item analysis:the average difficulty ranged from0.6to0.7, the majority of the items are acceptable, good or excellent differentiation.(2) Reference standards:there are significant different scores of RCWA among3,4,5years old children (p<0.05), but there was no difference between boys and girls (p>0.05).(3) Reliability research:the retest reliability values ranged from0.87to0.93, and split-half reliability value ranged from0.91to0.95, and homogeneity reliability values ranged from0.85to0.89.(4) Validity:the correlation coefficients between subtest and total scores and that among each subtest ranged from0.29to0.93, and most of them is significant. The correlation coefficients between RCWA and Child Vocabulary Picture Test ranged from0.30to0.37and reach statistical significance. The assessment scores of hearing-impaired children with language comprehension impairments were significantly lower than the normal children in RCWA.Conclusions:1. The vocabulary categories are refined in RCWA and assessment methods are operation easily. The results of the assessment have the functions of screening, diagnosis and prescription. The research has established the link between language assessment and training, and has provided new ways and means for the special children’s language comprehension assessment.2. The reference standards of RCWT for the3-5year-old preschool children in Shanghai area have significant reliability and validity. It is useful for the screening and diagnosis of child language comprehension impairments, especially for language comprehension assessment and training of children with hearing-impairment and mental retardation. The results have important guiding significance and application value for the diagnosis and therapeutic monitoring training of children with language disorders. |
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