A Fair Lexical Decision Task for Monolingual and Multilingual Spanish-speakers

This study describes the development and validation of ROAR Palabra, a novel Spanish lexical decision task designed for use with both Spanish-speaking children and Spanish-English bilinguals. This self-administered task requires students to decide whether a string of letters presented on the screen is a real word in Spanish. While there is evidence that scores on English lexical decision tasks are highly predictive of performance on conventional (time- and resource-intensive) word reading assessments in English (Yeatman et al., 2021), we explore whether this holds in Spanish, which has a much more transparent orthography. The specific goals are (i) to create a linguistically fair task and an item-response theory model for it and (ii) to evaluate whether such task can serve as a reliable proxy for conventional word reading measures, offering a quick and easy-to-administer tool for assessing reading skills across linguistic and cultural contexts. Results demonstrated strong correlations between performance on ROAR Palabra and standardized word reading assessments such as the Woodcock-Muñoz Batería IV, suggesting its effectiveness as a substitute measure. Notably, the task was sensitive to differences in language proficiency across both monolingual and multilingual groups, reflecting expected developmental and environmental influences. While not designed for the comparisons between monolingual and multilingual populations, the findings underscore the potential of this task as a versatile and culturally adaptable tool for reading assessments in different Spanish-speaking and bilingual contexts.