The validation of the THAM-3 (Test d’Habiletés Métalinguistiques n. 3, Pinto & El Euch 2015)

This paper describes the statistical analyses performed to validate the THAM-3 (Test d’Habiletés Métalinguistiques n°3, Pinto & El Euch 2015), a metalinguistic ability test for late adolescence and adulthood, translated from the original Italian version TAM-3 (Pinto & Iliceto 2007) into French with partial adaptations. The THAM-3 is composed of three subtests : Comprehension, Acceptability and Figurative language, and its scoring system is based on the distinction between Linguistic (L, measuring metalinguistic awareness at the implicit level) and Metalinguistic (ML, measuring metalinguistic awareness at the explicit level) scores. One hundred and fifty students recruited at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, aged from 19 to 52 years (mean age : 24.75 ; SD = 6.5), took the THAM-3 and the Raven’s SPM38 (Raven, Raven & Court 1998), as a measure of nonverbal intelligence to examine convergent validity. Means and standard deviations, Skewness and Kurtosis as measures of the shape of the distribution showed that the data were normally distributed. Reliability analyses, measured by Cohen’s Kappa (Cohen 1960) and Cronbach’s alpha, presented adequate estimates. Correlations between all the THAM-3 measures and the SPM38 scores were statistically significant. The results of Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA, Brown 2006) supported the theoretical two-factor structure of the original test, assigning the ML subtests’ scores to the corresponding Metalinguistic latent factor, the L subtests’ scores to the corresponding Linguistic latent factor, and explaining the inter-correlations between the observed variables. The final model provided a good fit to the empirical data, evidencing mainly the robustness of the Metalinguistic factor as a unitary construct. On the basis of these results, the THAM-3 can be considered as a valid measure of metalinguistic abilities for all subjects having French as their first language and also for advanced learners of French.