Development and Preliminary Validation of the Turkish Prosodic Comprehension Test (PCT)

Background: Prosodic cues play a critical role in marking syntactic boundaries and guiding sentence interpretation. However, Turkish clinical language batteries lack dedicated measures targeting linguistic prosody and the syntax-prosody interface. Consequently, subtle auditory-prosodic comprehension difficulties may go undetected in stroke populations who perform within normal limits on standard aphasia assessments. This study presents the development and initial psychometric evaluation of the Prosodic Comprehension Test (PCT), a Turkish sentence-picture matching tool designed to isolate prosodic contributions to meaning under controlled syntactic conditions. Methods: A total of 440 neurologically healthy native Turkish-speaking adults participated. An initial pool of 80 sentences (40 minimal pairs), identical in segmental and syntactic structure but differing in interpretation through prosodic boundary placement, was created. Audio stimuli were recorded by a professional actor, and corresponding visual stimuli represented alternative interpretations. Following expert review, 32 sentences (16 pairs) were retained and organized into three subcomponents: In situ Prosody, Focus-Topic Marking, and Pragmatic Disambiguation. Administration included fixed-intensity auditory presentation and a structured learning phase. Results: Internal consistency was acceptable (Cronbach's α = 0.73). Principal component analysis was consistent with the theoretically proposed three-component structure (KMO = 0.74; Bartlett's test significant, p < 0.001), with the three components collectively accounting for 28.2% of the total variance. Convergent validity was supported by a significant positive correlation with MoCA-TR (r = 0.23, p < 0.001, 95% CI [0.14, 0.32]). Conclusions: The PCT appears to be a linguistically grounded and psychometrically promising tool for assessing prosodic comprehension in Turkish. The present findings are based on a healthy adult sample and should be interpreted as preliminary normative evidence. Further research should address test-retest reliability, confirmatory factor analyses, and validation in clinical populations.