Hopf Suzanne C, McLeod Sharynne, McDonagh Sarah H
a Faculty of Arts and Education , Charles Sturt University , Bathurst , Australia.
b Faculty of Arts, Law and Education , University of the South Pacific , Suva , Fiji.
Clin Linguist Phon. 2017;31(7-9):487-502. doi: 10.1080/02699206.2016.1268208. Epub 2017 Jan 13.
Fiji is a multilingual nation with few assessment tools addressing children's communication. This article describes the validation of the Intelligibility in Context Scale for Fiji English, Standard Fijian, and Fiji Hindi. Informants were caregivers of 65 typically developing multilingual children (aged 5;3-10;5) attending a Fiji primary school. The students spoke an average of 2.9 languages (range = 1-5). Their main language was Standard Fijian (41.5%), Fiji Hindi (23.1%), Fiji English (20.0%), or Fijian dialect (15.4%). An ICS mean score of 4.6 was obtained for main language (ICS-ML) and 4.4 for Fiji English (ICS-FE) indicating that students were usually to always intelligible. There were no significant differences between main language, number of languages spoken, gender, age, or socio-economic status. Both scales had good internal consistency, but were not correlated with speech accuracy measures possibly due to ceiling effects. Further validation with younger children is recommended. The ICS may be a useful tool for Fiji with comparative results to other international studies.
斐济是一个多语言国家，但针对儿童沟通能力的评估工具却很少。本文描述了斐济英语、标准斐济语和斐济印地语的语境可懂度量表的验证情况。信息提供者是斐济一所小学的65名发育正常的多语言儿童（年龄在5岁3个月至10岁5个月之间）的照顾者。这些学生平均会说2.9种语言（范围为1至5种）。他们的主要语言是标准斐济语（41.5%）、斐济印地语（23.1%）、斐济英语（20.0%）或斐济方言（15.4%）。主要语言的ICS平均得分（ICS-ML）为4.6，斐济英语的ICS平均得分（ICS-FE）为4.4，这表明学生通常到总是能够被理解。在主要语言、所讲语言数量、性别、年龄或社会经济地位方面没有显著差异。两个量表都具有良好的内部一致性，但可能由于天花板效应，与语音准确性测量指标没有相关性。建议对年幼儿童进行进一步验证。ICS可能是斐济的一个有用工具，可与其他国际研究进行比较。
