From aardvark to ziggurat: A new tool for assessing children's use of rare vocabulary

Does Rare Vocabulary Use Distinguish Giftedness From Typical Development? A Study of School-Age African American Narrators

“…Although the WERVE was established with data from a large group of school-age children from primarily middle-income European American backgrounds (Mahurin-Smith et al, 2015), results of the current study suggest that the WERVE is effective for measuring rare vocabulary produced by school-age African American children. For example, similarly aged children across the two studies produced similar proportions of rare vocabulary.…”

“…In similar fashion, 21% of children in Mahurin-Smith et al (2015) produced narratives that did not include a rare word. However, a fair number of children never produced a rare word in either narrative type.…”

“…Such vocabulary measures provide information about the productivity (TNW) and diversity (NDW, TTR, VOCD) of children's narrative lexicons and are easily calculated by computerized software, such as Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT; Miller & Iglesias, 2012) and Computerized Language Analysis (CLAN;MacWhinney, 2000). The WERVE was positively correlated with schoolage children's performance on both criterion-referenced and norm-referenced indices of vocabulary (Mahurin-Smith et al, 2015). For example, studies have found that lexical diversity measures such as NDW (Mills, 2015b) and its derivative NDW rate-proportion of different word roots -did not distinguish African American children in general education classrooms from African American children in gifted education classrooms.…”

“…To evaluate vocabulary diversity in these narratives, we used a novel measure of rare vocabulary production, the WERVE (Mahurin-Smith et al, 2015). The WERVE is a list of uncommon words that generate a tally of the rare vocabulary produced in a language sample.…”

“…This measure compares the words in a given language sample to a corpus of 1.2 million words used in 1,437 transcripts of conversations and narratives produced by school-age participants during three of the Western Reserve Reading Project home visits (Petrill, Deater-Deckard, Thompson, DeThorne, & Schatschneider, 2006). Further information about the construction of the WERVE is available in Mahurin-Smith et al (2015). The narrative samples in the corpus were obtained when the children were 10 years old, on average; they completed the expressive portion of the Test of Narrative Language (TNL; Gillam & Pearson, 2004) and described one additional picture stimulus from the Test of Language Competence-Expanded Edition (Wiig & Secord, 1988).…”