title: Linguistic background and test material considerations in assessing sentence identification ability in English- and Spanish-English-speaking adolescents.
abstract: This study investigated the influence of linguistic background differences on sentence identification by groups of English- and Spanish-English-speaking adolescents. Subjects were required to identify recorded meaningful and nonmeaningful (synthetic) sentences presented in a white noise background using a closed message set-response format. The results indicate that linguistic background variables significantly influence sentence identification ability and that these variables are not adequately controlled for by a closed message set. A significant difference in the ability to identify meaningful and nonmeaningful sentences was revealed. Contrary to previous indications, synthetic sentence identification appeared to be contingent upon key work or phrase recognition.
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D003469:Culture; D004521:Educational Measurement; D004739:England; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D013030:Spain