Linguistic background and test material considerations in assessing sentence identification ability in English- and Spanish-English-speaking adolescents.

This study investigated the influence of linguistic background differences on sentence identification by groups of English- and Spanish-English-speaking adolescents. Subjects were required to identify recorded meaningful and nonmeaningful (synthetic) sentences presented in a white noise background using a closed message set-response format. The results indicate that linguistic background variables significantly influence sentence identification ability and that these variables are not adequately controlled for by a closed message set. A significant difference in the ability to identify meaningful and nonmeaningful sentences was revealed. Contrary to previous indications, synthetic sentence identification appeared to be contingent upon key work or phrase recognition.