Investigating the Convergent Validity of Child Language Assessment Measures: A Korean Study

This study examines the convergent validity between parental reports and direct measures of word comprehension in Korean infants. Parental reports, such as the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories, are commonly used in language development research due to their ease of use and ability to provide extensive data. However, there have been concerns about the accuracy of these reports in assessing comprehension, as parents can only infer comprehension from nonverbal responses. To address this issue, this study employs eye-tracking measures of word comprehension to compare the correlation and alignment between direct measures and parental reports. The results show that there is no correlation between word recognition performance and CDI percentile. The frequency of weekly reading was found to be correlated with both parent-reported language ability and direct measures of word comprehension. The comparison of the scores of parent-reported target words and word recognition measurements indicate that parents tend to report items more positively than the children's actual recognition of the words.