Production of Infant Scale Evaluation (PRISE) in Persian normal hearing children: A validation study

Tracking Listening Skill Development in Infants and Children with Hearing Loss: A Normative Dataset for the Functional Listening Index-Paediatric (FLI-P®)

BACKGROUND

Longitudinal studies highlight the importance of early intervention and timely device fitting for language development in children with congenital or early acquired hearing loss. Due to the variability in hearing loss, comorbidities, family circumstances, and service access, individualised monitoring of listening development is essential to inform decision-making. The Functional Listening Index-Paediatric (FLI-P), a 64-item hierarchical checklist of listening skills, has been validated for children with hearing loss aged 0-6 years. This study aimed to develop benchmarks for the FLI-P in typically hearing children, allowing for comparison with individual children with hearing loss.

METHODS

FLI-P scores were obtained from parents/caregivers of 561 typically hearing children aged 0-72 months. Each child's FLI-P score was categorised into a 6-month age block, with a minimum of 36 data points per block. Quantile regression was employed to establish percentiles of FLI-P scores by age.

RESULTS

FLI-P scores were successfully recorded for all 561 children. Regression analysis determined that the 16th and 84th percentiles of FLI-P scores corresponded to approximately ±1 standard deviation from the median score for each age group. A graphical representation of these percentile trajectories was created to facilitate comparison between children with hearing loss and the normative data.

CONCLUSION

A normative dataset of FLI-P scores from typically hearing children has been established, allowing for comparisons with the scores and developmental trajectories of individual children with hearing loss. The study demonstrates how FLI-P can guide early intervention decisions and effectively monitor progress.

Cross-cultural adaptation and psychometric assessment of a Persian version of Proctor's developmental vocal assessment protocol: Description of Persian infant vocal development

OBJECTIVES

With increasing recognition of the importance of pre-linguistic vocalization, and early intervention for children, proper protocols play an important role in documenting infants' progress and effects of early interventional programs. This study aimed to translate Proctor's Developmental Vocal Assessment Protocol into Persian, make cultural adaptations, assess Persian version of Developmental Vocal Assessment Protocol (P-DVAP)'s validity, internal consistency, and reliability, and provide a general perspective toward Persian infants' vocal behaviors.

METHODS

This study was mainly conducted in reference to Beaton's guidelines included translation, synthesis, back-translation, expert committee review, & pretesting. Ten well-experienced speech and language therapists contributed in expert committee review. Mothers of 202 infants were interviewed by experienced speech and language therapists.

RESULTS

Expert committee pointed out some difficulties that parents might have responding to P-DVAP. Such difficulties were sorted out in the P-DVAP applied for psychometric analysis. The Content Validity Index and Content Validity Ratio of P-DVAP were above 0.9. In test-retest reliability, Kappa coefficient was 0.6 and as the measure of inter item consistency, Kuder-Richardson-20 for each stage ranged from 0.1 to 0.5. Parents of typical infants reported variations in crying, vegetative sounds, laughing, prosody changes, babbling, approximants of meaningful words, and consonant-vowel structures as the most common vocal behaviors. The number of vocal behaviors reported for preterm infants after corrected gestational age was fewer than those of typical full-term infants.

CONCLUSION

The P-DVAP is a comprehensive, reliable, valid, simple and clear protocol for clinical evaluation of Persian infants' vocal behaviors.

Development of the Childhood Nonverbal Communication Scale

The aim of this study was to develop and validate the Childhood Nonverbal Communication Scale (CNCS) to assess nonverbal communication skills in children from birth to 18 months old. An extensive review of existing research provided evidence used to generate items representative of nonverbal communication behaviors. The final version of the CNCS includes 37 items divided in two dimensions (CNCS-1 and CNCS-2) showing high content validity (item-rated content validity index ≥ 0.75). The scale was administered to 428 Iranian Persian-speaking children 3 to 18 months old with normal development. According to the findings, the CNCS showed strong internal consistency (KR-20 = 0.965). Further, it had good convergent validity based on a significant correlation between total scores and the results of the Persian version of the Production of Infant Scale Evaluation (PRISE-P) (r = 0.5, P < 0.01). Therefore, the CNCS is a promising tool for measuring nonverbal communication in Iranian children from birth to 18 months of age.