Psychometric Evaluation of the Bilingual English–Spanish Assessment Sentence Repetition Task for Clinical Decision Making

Purpose The purpose of this study was (a) to examine the underlying components or factor structure of the Bilingual English–Spanish Assessment (BESA; Pena, Gutierrez-Clellen, Iglesias, Goldstein, & Bedore, 2014) sentence repetition task and (b) to examine the relationship between Spanish–English speaking children's sentence repetition and vocabulary performance. Method Participants were 291 Spanish–English speaking children in kindergarten and 1st grade. Item analyses were used to evaluate the underlying factor structure for each language version of the sentence repetition tasks of the BESA. The tasks were then examined in relation to a measure of English receptive vocabulary. Results Bifactor models, which include a single underlying general factor and multiple specific factors, provided the best overall model fit for both the Spanish and English versions of the task. There was no relation between children's overall Spanish sentence repetition performance and their English vocabulary. However, children's...