Early phonological development: creating an assessment test.

Area of Science:

• Speech-Language Pathology
• Developmental Psychology
• Linguistics

Background:

• Accurate assessment of early phonological skills is crucial for identifying developmental delays.
• Existing tools may not adequately consider age of acquisition and lexical norms for young children.
• The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventories provide valuable lexical data for child development research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce a novel protocol, Profiles of Early Expressive Phonological Skills (PEEPS), for assessing phonological systems in young children.
• To establish a word list for PEEPS based primarily on age of acquisition norms from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventories.
• To consider phonetic and semantic properties in the selection of test items.

Main Methods:

• Development of the Profiles of Early Expressive Phonological Skills (PEEPS) protocol.
• Selection of target words based on age of acquisition, lexical norms, and phonetic/semantic properties.
• Collection of word productions using the PEEPS protocol from children with typical development and children with cleft lip and/or palate.

Main Results:

• Children with typical development produced over 90% of target words by 24 months of age.
• Children with cleft lip and/or palate produced 73% of target words by 24 months of age.
• Administration time for the PEEPS protocol decreased with increasing age.

Conclusions:

• The PEEPS protocol offers a standardized method for evaluating early expressive phonological skills.
• Age of acquisition, informed by lexical norms, is a key factor in developing age-appropriate assessments for phonological development.
• PEEPS demonstrates potential utility in differentiating phonological performance between children with typical development and those with specific developmental challenges.