We describe the development and initial validation of the "ASL Fingerspelling and Number Comprehension Test" (ASL FaN-CT), a test of recognition proficiency for fingerspelled words in American Sign Language (ASL). Despite the relative frequency of fingerspelling in ASL discourse, learners commonly struggle to produce and perceive…

Chulalongkorn University Language Institute (CULI) test was developed as a local standardised test of English for professional and international communication. To ensure that the CULI test fulfils its intended purposes, this study employed Kane's argument-based validation and Rasch measurement approaches to construct the validity argument for the…

This study provides a preliminary validation of a Greek Sentence Repetition Task (SRT) with a sample of 110 monolingual and bilingual typically developing (TLD) children and examines the test's ability to distinguish between Greek monolingual children and age-matched Albanian-Greek bilinguals using a Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC)…

Clinical Question: For young AAE speakers (P), how useful is the Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS) compared with Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) in identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in the presence of African American English (AAE)? Method: Structured Review. Study Sources: PsycInfo®, Education Source, Education Resources…

This paper presents a new method for accurately measuring the vocabulary size of second language (L2) learners. Traditional vocabulary size tests (VSTs) are limited in capturing a tester's vocabulary and are often population-specific. To overcome these issues, we propose an intelligent vocabulary size measurement method that utilizes massive robot…

Background: There is no sufficiently accurate short-language measure that could be used by speech-language pathologists, teachers or paraprofessionals to screen young school-aged children to identify those requiring in-depth language evaluations. This may be due to poor development of the available measures, which have omitted crucial test…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the differences between the age of acquisition (AoA) and sentence length of sentences of the speech recognition (SR) tests for adults and children in Dutch, American English, and Canadian French. Method: The AoA and sentence length of the sentences of four SR tests for adults and children were…

Construct validity and building validity arguments are some of the main challenges facing the language assessment community. The notion of construct validity and validity arguments arose from research in psychological assessment and developed into the gold standard of validation/validity research in language assessment. At a theoretical level,…

Over the past decade, the LLAMA language aptitude test battery has come to play an increasingly important role as an instrument in research on individual differences in language development. However, a potentially serious problem that has been pointed out by several scholars is that the LLAMA has not yet been carefully validated. We addressed this…

Recent research in the areas of second language testing and learner corpus research has provided increased insight into linguistic features of various score levels and into the meaning of a test score (Cushing, 2017; Knoch & Chapelle, 2018). However, language testing researchers have asserted the need to select linguistic features that are…

Cognitive diagnostic models (CDMs) have received sustained attention in educational settings because they can be used to operationalize formative assessment to provide diagnostic feedback and inform instruction. A large number of CDMs have been developed over the past few years. An important component of all CDMs is a Q-matrix that specifies a…

Background: This study investigated the psychometric properties of the recently developed Qiyas for L1 Arabic language test using a Rasch measurement framework. Methods: Responses from 271 examinees were analyzed in this study. The test is hypothesized to involve one dominant factor that assesses four skills: reading comprehension, rhetorical…

Although an accurate measure of vocabulary size is integral to understanding the proficiency of language learners, the validity of multiple-choice (M/C) vocabulary tests to determine this has been questioned due to users guessing correct answers which inflates scores. In this paper the nature of guessing and partial knowledge used when taking the…

Clinical Question: Among school-age children who speak AAE (P), does the use of dialect scoring modifications (I), when compared to traditional scoring methods (C), yield more reliable identification of true language disorders (O)? Method: Structured Review. Study Sources: Google Scholar and ASHAWire. Search Terms: (1) "dialect" OR…

The present study investigated the speaking module of TOEFL iBT with an emphasis on the dichotomy of independent and integrated tasks. The potential differences between the two speaking conditions were intended to be explored based on the oral performance elicited from a group of Iranian test takers. To collect the required data, a simulated…