Development and psychometric evaluation of Persian version of fused dichotic rhymed word test for 6-11 year-old Persian speaking normal children

Dichotic listening tests have been used to study right ear advantage (REA). Fused dichotic rhymed word test (FDRWT), using rhymed words, is advantage­ous because of reducing the effect of attention on the test results. Development of Persian version of the FDRWT, and evaluation of its psychometric properties in normal children were the aims of the present study.
This study was conducted in two parts: selecting Persian monosyllabic word pairs according to the intended criteria and assessing content validity through Lawshe method. The test was set in a dichotic condition using four lists. Each list contains 30 pairs of words which were administered on 204 normal right-handed children from six different age groups (6-11 years old) of both genders. In order to evaluate the reliability of the test, retest was carried out within one to three weeks after the initial test.
Content validity index (CVI) of FDRWT was 0.89. The results indicated greater right ear average scores for all the age groups (p The findings showed desirable validity and reliability of Persian version of the FDRWT so it can be used in evaluation of hemispheric language specialization in Persian-speaking children. More studies are needed to examine the test results in children suspected of having central auditory processing deficits.