TY - JOUR
T1 - Validity evidence for a sentence repetition test of Swiss German Sign Language
AU - Haug, Tobias
AU - Batty, Aaron Olaf
AU - Venetz, Martin
AU - Notter, Christa
AU - Girard-Groeber, Simone
AU - Knoch, Ute
AU - Audeoud, Mireille
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project was partially funded by the University of Applied Sciences in Special Needs Education (HfH), The Federal Office for the Equality for Persons with a Disability (EBGB), and the Lottery Funds of the Cantones Schwyz and Zug. Additionally, the project was partially co-funded by the EU project SignMET: Sign Language Methodologies and Evaluation Tools (Education, Audiovisual & Culture Executive Agency: 543264-LLP-1-2013-1-IT-KA2-KA2MP).
Funding Information:
We would like to express special thanks to our colleague Martin Venetz, University of Applied Sciences in Special Needs Education, one of the co-authors of this paper who passed away on May 9, 2018. Martin provided us with continuous methodological support over the course of the project and contributed greatly to this paper. Additionally, we also would like to thank our colleagues who shared their sentence repetition tests with us: Peter Hauser and colleagues from the Rochester Institute of Technology, USA; Katherine Rowley, University College London (UCL); Chloe Marshall, UCL Institute of Education, London; Christian Rathmann, Humboldt-Universit?t zu Berlin; Okan Kubus, University of Applied Sciences Magdeburg-Stendal; Krister Sch?nstr?m, Stockholm University; and Pasquale Rinaldi and colleagues from the CNR, Rome. We also would like to thank all of our raters and test administrators, the schools for the Deaf, and the parents who were involved in this project. The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project was partially funded by the University of Applied Sciences in Special Needs Education (HfH), The Federal Office for the Equality for Persons with a Disability (EBGB), and the Lottery Funds of the Cantones Schwyz and Zug. Additionally, the project was partially co-funded by the EU project SignMET: Sign Language Methodologies and Evaluation Tools (Education, Audiovisual & Culture Executive Agency: 543264-LLP-1-2013-1-IT-KA2-KA2MP).
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2020.
PY - 2020/7/1
Y1 - 2020/7/1
N2 - In this study we seek evidence of validity according to the socio-cognitive framework (Weir, 2005) for a new sentence repetition test (SRT) for young Deaf L1 Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS) users. SRTs have been developed for various purposes for both spoken and sign languages to assess language development in children. In order to address the need for tests to assess the grammatical development of Deaf L1 DSGS users in a school context, we developed an SRT. The test targets young learners aged 6–17 years, and we administered it to 46 Deaf students aged 6.92–17.33 (M = 11.17) years. In addition to the young learner data, we collected data from Deaf adults (N = 14) and from a sub-sample of the children (n = 19) who also took a test of DSGS narrative comprehension, serving as a criterion measure. We analyzed the data with many-facet Rasch modeling, regression analysis, and analysis of covariance. The results show evidence of scoring, criterion, and context validity, suggesting the suitability of the SRT for the intended purpose, and will inform the revision of the test for future use as an instrument to assess the sign language development of Deaf children.
AB - In this study we seek evidence of validity according to the socio-cognitive framework (Weir, 2005) for a new sentence repetition test (SRT) for young Deaf L1 Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS) users. SRTs have been developed for various purposes for both spoken and sign languages to assess language development in children. In order to address the need for tests to assess the grammatical development of Deaf L1 DSGS users in a school context, we developed an SRT. The test targets young learners aged 6–17 years, and we administered it to 46 Deaf students aged 6.92–17.33 (M = 11.17) years. In addition to the young learner data, we collected data from Deaf adults (N = 14) and from a sub-sample of the children (n = 19) who also took a test of DSGS narrative comprehension, serving as a criterion measure. We analyzed the data with many-facet Rasch modeling, regression analysis, and analysis of covariance. The results show evidence of scoring, criterion, and context validity, suggesting the suitability of the SRT for the intended purpose, and will inform the revision of the test for future use as an instrument to assess the sign language development of Deaf children.
KW - Many-facet Rasch measurement
KW - Swiss German Sign Language (DSGS)
KW - sentence repetition test
KW - sign language test
KW - socio-cognitive framework of language test validation
KW - validity and reliability
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U2 - 10.1177/0265532219898382
DO - 10.1177/0265532219898382
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85078093478
SN - 0265-5322
VL - 37
SP - 412
EP - 434
JO - Language Testing
JF - Language Testing
IS - 3
ER -