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Development and Preliminary Validation of the Turkish Prosodic Comprehension Test (PCT)
Merve Savaş1, Göknur Miray Ceyhan Tasin1, Senanur Kahraman Beğen1
1Department of Speech and Language Therapy, Faculty of Health Sciences, Istanbul Atlas University, Istanbul 34408, Turkey.
Audiology Research
|July 24, 2026
Summary
This study developed the Prosodic Comprehension Test (PCT) to assess auditory-prosodic comprehension in Turkish speakers. The PCT shows promise for identifying subtle comprehension difficulties, particularly in stroke patients.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Neurology
- Psychometrics
Background:
- Prosodic cues are vital for sentence interpretation and syntactic boundary marking.
- Turkish clinical language assessments lack specific measures for linguistic prosody and the syntax-prosody interface.
- Subtle auditory-prosodic comprehension deficits may be missed in stroke survivors by standard aphasia tests.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop and evaluate the Prosodic Comprehension Test (PCT), a novel Turkish tool.
- To assess the PCT's ability to isolate prosodic contributions to meaning under controlled syntax.
- To provide a dedicated measure for auditory-prosodic comprehension in Turkish.
Main Methods:
- Developed 80 Turkish sentences (40 minimal pairs) differing in prosody-based interpretation.
- Recorded stimuli by a professional actor; created corresponding visual stimuli for alternative meanings.
- Administered the final 32-sentence (16-pair) PCT to 440 healthy adults across three subcomponents: In situ Prosody, Focus-Topic Marking, and Pragmatic Disambiguation.
Main Results:
- The PCT demonstrated acceptable internal consistency (Cronbach's α = 0.73).
- Principal component analysis supported a three-component structure, explaining 28.2% of the variance.
- Convergent validity was indicated by a significant positive correlation with MoCA-TR (r = 0.23, p < 0.001).
Conclusions:
- The Prosodic Comprehension Test (PCT) is a promising, linguistically grounded tool for Turkish prosodic comprehension assessment.
- Preliminary normative data from healthy adults suggest the PCT's potential utility.
- Further research is needed for test-retest reliability, confirmatory factor analysis, and clinical population validation.
