Validation of the Brazilian Children's Test of Pseudoword Repetition in Portuguese speakers aged 4 to 10 years

Abstract

The phonological loop is a component of the working memory system specifically involved in the processing and manipulation of limited amounts of information of a sound-based phonological nature. Phonological memory can be assessed by the Children's Test of Nonword Repetition (CNRep) in English speakers but not in Portuguese speakers due to phonotactic differences between the two languages. The objectives of the present study were: 1) to develop the Brazilian Children's Test of Pseudoword Repetition (BCPR), a Portuguese version of the CNRep, and 2) to validate the BCPR by correlation with the Auditory Digit Span Test from the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. The BCPR and Digit Span were assessed in 182 children aged 4-10 years, 84 from Minas Gerais State (42 from a rural region) and 98 from the city of São Paulo. There are subject age and word length effects causing repetition accuracy to decline as a function of the number of syllables of the pseudowords. Correlations between BCPR and Digit Span forward (r = 0.50; P ≤ 0.01) and backward (r = 0.43; P ≤ 0.01) were found, and partial correlation indicated that higher BCPR scores were associated with higher Digit Span scores. BCPR appears to depend more on schooling, while Digit Span was more related to development. The results demonstrate that the BCPR is a reliable measure of phonological working memory, similar to the CNRep.

Levels of Phonological Awareness, Working Memory, and Lexical Knowledge in Elementary School Children

“…comparison tasks, for which the working memory ability may be minimally required. The results indicate a positive correlation between the BCPR and the digit span (Table 3), which supports the findings described by Santos and Bueno (2003), demonstrating that the two tests can be used to obtain reliable results with regard to the evaluation of the phonological working memory of children between five and seven years of age. Study 1 showed that there are distinct levels of development of specific phonological awareness abilities and that the syllabic and phonemic abilities seem to be more dependent on the phonological working memory abilities than the suprasegmental abilities.…”

“…Regarding the digit span, it was observed that the children had greater difficulty remembering digits in reverse order than in direct order, which corresponds to the normative data of Santos and Bueno (2003). According to Gathercole (1998), this difficulty is due to the difference in the ability required for the processing of the tasks.…”

“…As can be seen, the mean scores presented for the BCPR show that the mean score of the participants was 34 points on the scale. According to Santos and Bueno (2003), this result can be considered as expected for children 6 years of age.…”

“…Brazilian Repetition of Pseudowords Test (BCPR) (Santos & Bueno, 2003) aims to evaluate the phonological working memory abilities. It consists of 40 pseudowords (stimuli) with four different extensions, ten stimuli for each extension: two, three, four and five syllables.…”

“…The levels of phonological working memory are estimated by the overall total points: The more points, the more accurate the phonological working memory ability. The psychometric properties of this test can be found in Santos and Bueno (2003). (Wechsler, 1991), which aims to evaluate components of working memory: the phonological loop (direct order) and the central executive (reverse order).…”