Standardization of Odia Stimuli for Few Phonological and Morphological Tasks

Abstract

Phonological skills development is one of the basic foundations before language mastery of a child. Similarly, morphological skills development in children is a basic link between cognitive language functions and literacy, which also makes a unique contribution to vocabulary growth and acquisition. To test phonological and morphological abilities or skills, testing tool should be available in the native language of the speaker or the participant. Translated versions of different such tests may not yield similar results for a typical developing child compared to the native speaker age matched child, tested on the original test. Therefore, such tests or tools are warranted to be constructed in the native language of the speaker. The formation of test procedures in a language is essential for testing different psycholinguistic abilities and testing hypotheses regarding normal development and patterns of development related to various disorders. Odia is one of the alphasyllabic languages of the Indic group of the Indo-European family, with unique features of few phonemes, morphophonemic and morphosyntactic rules, dissimilar to its sister languages. Very few and limited studies exist on the development pattern of acquisition of linguistic skills (specifically phonology and morphological skills) in Odia language in general and specifically the lexical and conceptual levels in Odia language. The present study reports on the development and standardization of stimuli as a part of PhD research, aiming at developing a screening test to assess phonological and morphological abilities in Odia speaking individuals. The test stimuli include words, non-words, segments of words, sentences and synthetically modified words, targeted to measure fifteen different subtests in the area of phonology and morphology, like syllable segmentation, word blending, morphological closure etc. Development of the test stimuli included preparation of initial word lists for familiarity testing by 10 adults (25-35 years) and 10 children 10-12 years), preparation of test stimuli like words, non-words, sentences, word pairs, modified words and presentation to pilot subjects (12 sub-groups of typically developing children and one adult group), twice with an interval of one month. The two data obtained from the pilot sub-groups compared and scores were analysed to check test-retest reliability. Summary: The analysis indicated a clear internal consistency and therefore the stimuli were finalized to be used for the main data collection to develop a screening test in assessing these abilities in Odia-speaking children. Key words: Stimuli, Familiarity, Phonological abilities, Morphological abilities, Odia language