Development of the Brazilian version of the Child Hayling Test.

Introduction:: The Hayling Test assesses the components of initiation, inhibition, cognitive flexibility and verbal speed by means of a sentence completion task. This study presents the process of developing the Brazilian version of the Child Hayling Test (CHT) and reports evidence of its content validity.

Methods:: 139 people took part in the study. The adaptation was performed by seven translators and 12 specialist judges. An initial sample of 92 healthy children was recruited to test a selection of sentences adapted from previous adult and pediatric versions of the instrument, and a sample of 28 healthy children was recruited for pilot testing of the final version. The instrument was developed in seven stages: 1) translation, 2) back-translation, 3) comparison of translated versions, 4) preparation of new stimuli, 5) data collection with healthy children to analyze comprehension of the stimuli and analyses by the authors against the psycholinguistic criteria adopted, 6) analyses conducted by judges who are specialists in neuropsychology or linguistics, and 7) the pilot study.

Results:: Twenty-four of the 72 sentences constructed were selected on the basis of 70-100% agreement between judges evaluating what they assessed and level of comprehensibility. The pilot study revealed better performance by older children, providing evidence of the instrument's sensitivity to developmental factors.

Conclusions:: Future studies employing this version of CHT with clinical pediatric populations who have frontal lesions and dysfunctions and in related areas are needed to test functional and differential diagnoses of preserved or impaired executive functions.