persian articulation assessment for children aged 3 - 6 years: a validation study

Objectives: the present study aimed to adapt articulation assessment, a subtest of the diagnostic evaluation of articulation and phonology, and to determine its reliability and validity for persian speaking children. methods: the persian version of articulation assessment (paa) was administered to 387 children aged between 36 - 72 months, m (sd):53.7 (± 10.1) by month, after the adaptation process. a methodological study including test–retest reproducibility, score-rescore consistency and evaluating validity (through content, convergent and discriminative validity) was then carried out in order to determine the psychometric properties of the instrument. results: content validity ratio for persian item’s content coverage, agreement image and syllable structure were 0.86 - 1, 0.92 and 0.94, respectively. minimum content validity index of 0.93 exceeded in terms of relevancy, simplicity and clarity of instructions. the percentage agreement for the test-retest was 91.35-100% and the score-rescore analysis was 92.95-100%. the convergent validity was reasonable. the persian articulation assessment’s mean scores for individuals with articulation disorders being significantly lower than those by normal children, showed discriminative validity (t = 7.245, df = 34, p < 0.001). conclusions: the persian version of articulation assessment is suggestive of a reliable and valid instrument for evaluating the articulation skills in persian speaking children.