fLEX: Flexioa eta LEXikoa aztertzeko test eleanitza (5-10 urteko hamar haur euskaldunen emaitzen azterketa).

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present the purpose, structure and functioning of the fLEX software and to examine the data collected from the assessment of ten Basque-speaking children. 160 stimuli divided in five oral tasks make up fLEX, which assesses lexical  and inflectional processing in production and comprehension: object and action naming; sentence production and comprehension; and, case and postpositional phrase production. It was predicted that no difficulty would emerge in performing these tasks for children older than 5. Ten Basque-speaking children, ages 5 through 10, participated in the study. Of the five tasks, the poorest results were found in the sentence production task. The verb auxiliaries "ditu" and "die" were specifically prone to errors in production but not in comprehension. Ergative, destinative and local genitive case production was more problematic than the production of other cases. Data are described quantitatively and qualitatively, by pointing out weaknesses in lexical and inflectional processing. Defining typically developing children' weaknesses is crucial in order to diagnose language disorders. In addition to providing a useful corpus from a psycholinguistic perspective, the goal of this paper is to emphasize the need for developing language assessment tools in Basque.