The development, validity, reliability of Turkish phonological awareness test

Phonological awareness skills are accepted as predictors for future speech and literacy problems and they are considered to be the pre-skills of speech sound production or literacy. Therefore, initially, an assessment tool must be developed to make a plan for phonological awareness intervention towards to improve these abilities. However, there is not enough standardized test to assess phonological awareness skills for Turkish. In this case, studies are implemented on the basis of informal assessment and without a base on certain plans. The purpose of this study is to develop a reliable and valid test to assess phonological awareness skills of typically developed children between 4;0-8;11 years of age. Turkish Phonological Awareness Test (PAT) consists of 16 subtests with four linguistic levels. PAT was administered to 524 typically developing children and 30 children with speech sound disorders. Content validity, construct validity, discriminant validity analyses were used to explore the validity of PAT. The results revealed the factorial structure of PAT with the confirmatory factor analysis both four-dimensional linguistic levels and sixteen-dimensional tasks. Construct validity also supported by correlational analysis. PAT's discriminant validity was found to be high. Internal consistency and objectivity analyses were used to explore the reliability of PAT. The results revealed that PAT is a reliable assessment tool.