Prueba repetición de oraciones para niños de 24 a 48 meses (PRO-24). Estudio piloto con niños típicos y niños sordos con implante coclear

This article describes a sentence repetition task, the PRO-24, designed for use in children with normal development, aged between 24 and 48 months. The potential usefulness of the PRO-24 was analyzed in two distinct studies. The first study was carried out in 18 typically developing children whose chronological ages ranged between 26 and 40 months. A strong correlation was found between chronological age and the PRO-24 score. Multiple regression analysis revealed that the main predictors of success in repeating each sentence were the number of syllables in a sentence, followed by the number of content words. Qualitative analysis revealed that the children made errors typical for their age, commonly observed in spontaneous language (e.g., protoarticles, morphological generalizations, omissions of unstressed words, etc.). The second analysis evaluated the results of a group of 10 deaf children with a cochlear implant (CI). Age at CI implantation was between 12 and 24 months. The time of implant use ranged between 30 and 42 months. A sample of spontaneous language was obtained from each child. Most CI users scored very poorly in the PRO-24. Five children scored zero. However, the mean length of utterance in the PRO-24 was significantly correlated with that in spontaneous language. Other data confirmed the close parallelism between the data sets. We conclude that the PRO-24 score is a true reflection of a child's command of productive language. Consequently, this task is potentially useful in evaluation of early language development and research in this field.