The development a homophone nonword visual memory task and the determination of its validity and reliability in school age children

A majority of the children's spelling disorders occur due to mistakes in homophones. Relatively, this study aimed to design a visual memory task for non-word homophones and determine its validity and reliability among primary school children.
In this cross-sectional and descriptive-analytic study, 341 primary school students were recruited. The initial 120 items were extracted from the Iranian children language by referring to the first-grade Persian literature book and Persian core vocabulary. After refining, 60 items remained from which the target non-words were made by changing or adding one or two homophone letters in each word based on the phonological rules of the Persian language. The non-words that received the highest content validity by referring to 18 speech therapists and linguists were selected as final non-words of the test (23 items). Content validity ratio (CVR) was used to determine the validity of the non-words. The reliability was determined by test-retest method. The comparison of the mean score of visual memory of the non-words was performed in terms of the number of their syllables.
CVR and reliability of the test were found 0.816 and 0.852, respectively. The mean scores of visual memory test of homophone non-words among the students were significantly different in terms of the number of syllables of the non-words (P According to the findings of this study, visual memory test of homophone non-words has a proper content validity and reliability. Conclusively, the length of the non-word (number of syllables) can be examined as an effective factor in the student's mean test scores in future studies