Sprachstandsdiagnostik im Vorschulalter unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von kognitiven Basiskompetenzen

Abstract

Background: Language is important for the psychosocial and educational development of a child and is interrelated with cognitive abilities. Language deficits in childhood are associated with many subsequent problems and affect the person concerned through adulthood. The review of language skills in preschool plays a special role. Aim: This dissertation will investigate how language skills can be estimated during the diagnostic process and which cognitive basic competences affect language skills of children aged between four and five years. Different linguistic levels are considered and compared. Methods: Pursuing findings of the construction and norming phase of the language assessment test for children between 3 and 5 years of age (SET 3-5; Petermann, 2016) are described in depth and discussed. This includes an examination into what way the current test methods acquire general language standards comply with the interdisciplinary guidelines of linguistic assessment. Furthermore, the construction of a new language assessment test is described and the relationship of language skills and cognitive skills are illustrated. The results of each study are integrated into a comprehensive model. The empirical analyses are based on data of the construction (N = 316) and standardization (N = 1095) of the SET 3-5. Results: The results show a deficiency of evidence-based test methods relating to estimation of language abilities, what requires the development of new test methods. The newly developed test SET 3-5 proceeds from this stage with a wide variation of item difficulties, differentiations in various ranges of performance and an intern consistency in the different subtests from satisfying to good. Moreover one of the important outcome was the influence of basic competences like processing performance or memory capacity of the different linguistic levels. The results show as well that the pragmatic communicative competences are associated with the behavior and the socio-emotional development. Conclusion: The results of the present dissertation are contributing an important part to answer the question regarding how to measure the language level in a reliable way and which part the review of cognitive skills in the range of linguistic assessment plays. With regard to the inclusion of a social communication disturbance as an own fault category to the diagnostical and statistical manual of psychological disorders (DSM-5; Falkai&Wittchen, 2015) first results concerning the influence of cognitive basic competences to pragmatics were found. The focus of scientific research should be the development of additional evidence-based test methods and the design of therapy measures and incentive methods.