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The data came from 9 monolingual Farsi-speaking children and 9 bilingual English Farsi-speaking children. The monolingual group included children whose caregiver(s) were native speakers of Farsi who were born and currently live in Iran. The bilingual group included children whose caregiver(s) were native speakers of Farsi and born in the USA. The children’s exposure and use of Farsi and English were confirmed by caregiver report. The Farsi dialect of the children was free to vary, with 6 identified as Afghan and 12 as Persian. All children were classified as developing language typically per caregiver report.

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Table 1. Participant Characteristics

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Research on nonword repetition (NWR) tasks for assessing bilingual children has yielded mixed results (Engel de Abreu et al., 2013; Thordardottir & Brandeker, 2013). Chiat and Polišenská (2016) developed the Cross-Linguistic NWR (CL-NWR) task to account for language-specific variations in prosody and syllable structure. The task incorporates phonemes from diverse languages, enhancing its universality. The CL-NWR test has consistently yielded reliable scores across different groups, suggesting its potential for assessing children from varied linguistic and sociocultural backgrounds (Chiat & Polišenská, 2016).

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As an exploratory study, we examined the clinical usefulness of using the CL-NWR task with monolingual Farsi- and bilingual Farsi/English-speaking children. The research questions were:

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1. Do CL-NWR scores differ between monolingual Farsi- and bilingual Farsi/English-speaking children?
2. Do CL-NWR scores correlate with the children’s ages?

Exploring Nonword Repetition for Farsi and Farsi/English-Speaking Children Using a Quasi-Universal Task

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Tahmineh Maleki and Janna B. Oetting

Louisiana State University

Chiat and Polišenská’s (2016) CL-NWR task included 16 nonwords evenly distributed across two, three, four, and five syllables. Each syllable followed a simple consonant-vowel (CV) structure, with a variety of consonants (e.g., /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/, /s/, /z/, /l/, /m/, /n/) and vowels (e.g., /a/, /i/, /u/).

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The CL-NWR task was administered using Zoom, with the task audio played from a power point created by Chiat and Polišenská (2016). Presentation of the nonwords were embedded into an activity that allowed the children to add a bead to a necklace when they repeated each nonword.

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The children’s responses were scored as correct/incorrect for consonants, vowels, and total (maximum = 112). Additions were not counted as errors.

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Reliability of scoring was examined by having a second examiner independently score responses from 4 (22%) of the children. The second examiner was a Farsi-speaking speech-language pathologist who served children who speak various dialects of Farsi, including Afghan and Persian. Percent of agreement between the examiners was 96%.

Armon-Lotem, S., & Chiat, S. (2012). How do sequential bilingual children perform on nonword repetition tasks. Proceedings of the 36th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 36, 53–62. Cascadilla Press.

Chiat, S., & Polišenská, K. (2016). A framework for crosslinguistic nonword repetition tests: Effects of bilingualism and socioeconomic status on children’s performance. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 59(5), 1179–1189. https://doi.org/10.1044/2016_JSLHR-L-15-0293

Engel de Abreu, P. M. E., Baldassi, M., Puglisi, M. L., & Befi-Lopes, D. M. (2013). Cross-linguistic and cross-cultural effects on verbal working memory and vocabulary: Testing language-minority children with an immigrant background. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 56(2), 630-642. https://doi.org/10.1044/1092-4388(2012/12-0079)

McDonald, J., Wynn Moland, C., & Oetting, J. B. (2024). In search of an NWR task for child speakers of AAE. Poster presented at SRLCD, Madison WI.

Thordardottir, E., & Brandeker, M. (2013). The effect of bilingual exposure versus language impairment on nonword repetition and sentence imitation scores. Journal of Communication Disorders, 46(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcomdis.2012.08.002

Data

Materials

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Rationale

Results

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Conclusions

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References

SRCLD 2024

Disclosure: The authors have no financial or nonfinancial conflicts of interest.

The CL-NWR task seems to have potential as an unbiased clinical tool for monolingual Farsi-speaking and bilingual Farsi/English-speaking children. Nevertheless, more data is needed to compare these data to other monolingual and bilingual groups. In the future, we also need to examine the children’s CL-NWR percentages by syllable length.

Initially, a 2 (language) X 2 (dialect) ANOVA was conducted using CL-NWR percent correct as the dependent variable. No main effects or interactions were observed for dialect. Given this, the analysis involved a one-way ANOVA.

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Results showed that the two language groups did not differ in their CL-NWR percentages; F(1, 16) = .946, p = .95

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The children’s mean CL-NWR percentages were also consistent with the 86% mean found for English-speaking children studied by McDonald et al. (2024).

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Table 2. CL-NWR Mean (SD) Percentage by Language

The children’s CL-NWR percentages were positively correlated to their ages in months. The correlation was moderate in magnitude ( r = .56, p = .02).

Figure 1. Scatter Plot of CL-NWR by Age in Months