Instruments to assess children’s language and speech translated and adapted into Brazilian Portuguese: an integrative literature review

Abstract

Purpose: to analyze the content and translation guidelines of instruments meant to assess language, speech sound production, and communicative skills of children, adapted to Brazilian Portuguese. Methods: a search was conducted in national and international databases to select articles on the assessment of language, speech, and communicative skills in children, considering the descriptors “translation”, “adaptation”, “cultural adaptation”, “cross-cultural adaptation”, “language”, “speech”, and “pragmatic”. The search was conducted in the SciELO, Virtual Health Library, PubMed/MEDLINE, and Latin American and Caribbean Health Sciences Literature. Results: eight assessment instruments compatible with the inclusion criteria were found. Conclusion: of the instruments found, four approached specific investigations, such as syntax, narrative, pragmatic skills, and speech sound organization, while the other four had a more encompassing profile, verifying form, content, and/or use (pragmatics). Concerning the guidelines, the most recurrent stages between the translation proposals were translation, conciliation of the previous stage or synthesis version, back-translation, reviewing committee, pretest, and final version. The conceptual, item and operational equivalences were frequently cited for verification.

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“…Research has also focused on looking at how the original assessment tools have been adapted and used in a variety of situations and contexts. Child speech assessments translated and adapted into Portuguese in Brazil, including TELD-3, PLAI-2, CELF, CCC-2, TNL, DEMSS, and the Parental Inventory "Language Use Inventory", confirmed that "using a medium in another language is a difficult task because of its numerous special requirements" (Silva et al, 2021). Another similar study also showed that there are about 19 speech assessment tools used for monolingual children, and there are many similarities between these tools (Lugossy, 2007).…”

“…Yashina to evaluate logical coherence in text passages, appropriateness of the use of lexical means, correctness of selected grammatical structures, and syntactic diversity of sentences, as well as the child's degree of independence in performing tasks (Silva et al, 2021).…”