Comparing Online and Face-to-Face Administration of the Polish Sentence Repetition Task in Monolingual and Multilingual Children: Higher Scores in Face-to-Face Testing.

Abstract

This study compared online and face-to-face (f2f) testing using the short Polish version of the LITMUS Sentence Repetition Task (SRep) with multilingual and monolingual Polish-speaking children. The shift to remote testing during the COVID-19 pandemic prompted questions about whether online methods yield results comparable with in-person testing for assessing multilingual children's grammatical abilities. Reliable online testing could enhance access to underrepresented populations, enabling families from diverse backgrounds to participate from home. We tested 92 multilingual children (speaking Polish and English or German) and 55 monolingual Polish-speaking children aged 4;6-7;6. Each child completed the SRep task twice (online and f2f) in a counterbalanced order. Results showed better performance on f2f tasks for both groups. Multilingual children improved on their second attempt, regardless of format, while monolinguals consistently scored higher in the f2f condition. These findings indicate differences in performance across testing modalities and the need to adapt and norm the SRep task for both online and f2f administration separately.