Abstract:
The PEOPLE test is designed to distinguish between children of Mexican descent who have a language disability and those who have Limited English Proficiency. It is appropriate for children between 6-10 years of age who are being schooled in the United States, and is individually administered by a bilingual language/speech specialist. The test requires only oral responses and has five parts: 1) Auditory Sequential Memory, in which a child hears a string of unrelated words and must say them back in the same order; this section is based on the assumption that a minimum auditory retention span is necessary for intellectual functioning and the development of linguistic skills; 2) Auditory Association, in which children must identify antonyms for words and group words in classes; 3) Encoding, in which children must associate words across syntactic categories such as "eat-food"; 4) Story Comprehension, in which children must answer comprehension questions about stories told to them by the examiner; and 5) Sentence Repetition, in which children repeat sentences after the experimenter. The complexity of the sentences increases as the test progresses. Norms were established on 674 students from Southern California in the appropriate age range and test-retest reliability using Cronbach's Alpha was estimated at .97. Factor analysis was used to assess construct validity.