title: Validation of the Intelligibility in Context Scale for school students in Fiji.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: 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.
authors.forename: Suzanne C
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5572-9956
authors.initials: SC
authors.lastname: Hopf
authors.affiliation: a Faculty of Arts and Education , Charles Sturt University , Bathurst , Australia.
authors.forename: Sharynne
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7279-7851
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: McLeod
authors.affiliation: a Faculty of Arts and Education , Charles Sturt University , Bathurst , Australia.
authors.forename: Sarah H
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: McDonagh
mesh_terms: D017028:Caregivers / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D005367:Fiji; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires
keywords: Assessment; Fiji; Intelligibility in Context Scale; intelligibility; speech