MULTILINGUAL CHILD ASSESSMENT

# **Appendix A: Receptive Vocabulary Test Translation and Adaptation**

To create the receptive vocabulary assessments, we first asked local staff, fluent in all languages, to translate and back-translate the first 106 items of the British Picture Vocabulary Scale – III (BPVS III; Dunn, Dunn, & Styles, 2009) into Luo and Swahili. The team also evaluated the translated words (for both languages) across various criteria, including (a) does an easily translated, corresponding word exist? (b) is this word commonly known or used? (c) what is the estimated difficulty of this word for young children? (d) is this word common and the same for both rural and urban populations? (e) is the picture representing the stimulus word culturally appropriate and familiar? (f) are the distractor pictures culturally appropriate and familiar? (g) if the stimulus word or picture is not appropriate, which other picture in the plate could be substituted?

This process produced the following results: for 9 of the stimulus words, the translation to Luo and Swahili resulted in the same word (for example, “money” is referred to as “pesa” in both languages; “airplane” is “ndege” in both languages); 26 words had no commonly known directly translated equivalent in Luo among adult speakers interviewed; 12 words had no equivalent in Swahili, and 11 had no translation in either Luo or Swahili; 13 Luo and 10 Swahili translations were not single words, but were phrases, or words with a qualifier (e.g., “gigantic” was translated as “very big” in Swahili); 5 Swahili and four Luo words were appropriated from English, and were identical or nearly identical to the English word; and for 12 stimulus items, the words were suitable for piloting, but the pictures were inappropriate or unfamiliar. Eight plates had words that were more likely to be known in English and were not translated. Luo was the most difficult language to work with, as it had the most limitations in translating the stimulus words, so we created this list first. To increase our capacity to select the best words possible, we (PK, OO) engaged a focus group of 6 Luo-speaking mothers and teachers to review 32 words for which we either had no suitable translation, or that were candidate items not part of the original BPVS III.

We piloted 58 items with about 30 Luo-speaking children 2-6 years of age, and examined pass rates for each word by age group (younger or older than five years). Words were then grouped by estimated difficulty level (hard, average or easy), and we sought to have roughly the same number of items at each of the three difficulty levels. As we lacked a sufficient number of Luo words across the three categories, we created some new stimulus words based on results from the focus groups (lantana, bull, roar), providing our own plates of pictures for each. The final Luo test includes 27 items, with approximately 9 words in each difficulty level. Of these 27 items, three were new words and pictures, three involved translations including two words (no one-word translation was known), one used a distractor picture to replace the original stimulus picture (“boulder” replaced “mountain”), one replaced a plate with more familiar looking pictures, and one slightly changed the stimulus word (from “applauding” to “clapping,” as our translators were aware of no distinct word for “applauding.”).

We repeated a similar process for creating tests in Swahili (32 items) and English (34 items), each with roughly one-third of items in the three difficulty categories. The Swahili test included two items altered by changing the stimulus word to a distractor picture, and one item with the stimulus word slightly altered (from “sawing” to “cutting”). Nine items were changed for the English test. Five stimulus words were changed to better reflect the English words used for the stimulus picture (e.g., “zipper” was changed to “zip;” “sedan” was changed to “saloon car”); three distractor pictures replaced original stimulus items; and a new item was introduced,