Adaptation of the Syllable Repetition Task (SRT) and determining its validity and reliability in 4-6 Persian speaking children

Objectives: this study aimed to evaluate the psychometric properties of the srt that was performed in4-6 year-old persian-speaking children. the srt is a nonword repetition task that assesses phonologicalworking memory and was designed by shriberg in 2008. methods: the present research was a non-experimental study with a methodological design. the contentvalidity of the task was evaluated by 15 speech language pathologists (slp). the lawshe coefficient wasacceptable, and therefore without changing the number and phonological structure of the nonwords, thesrt was performed by 140 normal children in two groups (4-5 and 5-6 years old) that were selectedrandomly from 10 kindergartens of tehran. to assess the test-retest reliability, the srt was performed atone-week intervals. finally, to determine the differential validity of the srt, the task was performed in30 children with speech sound disorders (ssd) that had been selected from speech and language clinicsof tehran. spss software version 21 was used to  determine the pearson correlation coefficient,cronbach's alpha coefficient and t-test.results: the cvr coefficient of the srt was between 0.57 and 1. cronbach's alpha coefficient of thetotal score was 0.83, and the pearson correlation coefficient between successive runs was 0.87 (p <0.001).there was a significant difference between the performances of two age groups (p=0.00). also, the srtscore in ssd children was significantly lower than in normal children (p=0.00).discussion: the srt appears to be a psychometrically  valid and reliable nonword repetition task forevaluating phonological working memory. the evidence of the differential validity of the srt wasapproved in two ways: differences between two age groups of normal children and differences betweennormal and ssd groups. the poor performance of children with ssd indicates that these patients havedifficulty to store and retrieve phonological information in their working memory.