The concurrent validity of the Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test for Mexican-American children

Abstract

The Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (EOWPVT) and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT-R) were administered to 50 bilingual, Mexican-American children in grades 3-5. The students' relative performance on these two vocabulary tests, as well as their error patterns, was examined. The results revealed that the EOWPVT has adequate concurrent validity with the PPVT-R, and that on both tests the students' scores were almost two standard deviations below the normative mean. The outcome indicating that the expressive vocabulary score was higher than the receptive vocabulary score is explained in terms of differences of item content and in the composition of the norm samples for the two tests. Items that generated high error rates are identified to facilitate appropriate interpretation of the EOWPVT when used with Mexican-American children.The Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (EOWPVT) (Gardner, 1979(Gardner, , 1983) offers a potentially useful complementary test to the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT-R) (Dunn & Dunn, 1981). Whereas the PPVT-R has been the subject of numerous validity studies that cut across age levels, ethnic groups, and clinical samples (Bracken, McCallum, & Prasse, 1984), the EOWPVT has received limited validation. The EOWPVT manual (Gardner, 1979) suggests that this expressive vocabulary test can be administered to Mexican-American children, but reports validity coefficients of .67, .70, and .77 between the EOWPVT and the PPVT-R for only three samples of nonminority preschool children. In one other study, Furlong and Teuber (1984) found concurrent validity coefficients of .80 and S8, respectively, between the EOWPVT and PPVT-R for younger (6-9 years old) and older (10-12 years old) learning disabled students. However, the learning disabled students actually obtained higher scores on the EOWPVT than on the PPVT-R, a counterintuitive finding. Thus, although moderate concurrent validity coefficients for the EOWPVT have been found, it still remains to verify these findings for special populations such as Mexican-American children.In evaluating the validity of the EOWPVT, Furlong and Teuber (1984) suggested that the disproportionate number of nouns in the EOWPVT (97%) compared with the PPVT-R (Form L: 80%; Form M: 72%) confounds attempts to evaluate the test's construct validity. With vocabulary tests of equivalent difficulty, one would ordinarily expect higher scores on a receptive measure than on its expressive counterpart. This is due to the more complex response requirements of a recall (expressive) vs. a recognition (receptive) task (Ellis, 1978). The fact that the EOWPVT consists almost entirely of nouns may affect its difficulty level when contrasted with the PPVT-R's higher percentage of adjective and verb forms. This item content difference could obscure performance differences attributable to the response modalities of these two vocabulary tests and lead to erroneous interpretations, particularly when assessing the unique language abilities of bilin...

A comparison of three different measures of intelligence with preschool children identified at-risk

“…The children in this sample tended to obtain slightly higher standard scores on the EOWPVT than on the PPVT-R. This finding is consistent with Teuber and Furlong (1985) and Furlong and Teuber (1984), who found a 4-point differential favoring the EOWPVT over the PPVT-R. The standard score of the PPVT-R correlation (r = .73) is very similar to that reported by Teuber and Furlong.…”

“…As Davis and Kramer (1985) pointed out, the PPVT-R is an estimate of verbal intelligence by means of measuring expressive vocabulary, regardless of the arguments raised against using it. Teuber and Furlong (1985) contend that there is little research regarding the validity of the EOWPVT. Gardner (1979) reported correlations with the PPVT of .67 to .78 and of .73 with the WPPSI Verbal Scale IQ.…”

The clinical utility of nonword repetition for children living in the rural south of the US

“…Unfortunately, most standardized tests that are available to speech-language clinicians have not been developed with socio-culturally neutral (i.e., un-biased) materials. Thus, it is not surprising that when children from minority backgrounds score lower than expected on a standardized tool, cultural biases within the test are often suggested as a possible explanation (Kayser, 1995;Pena & Quinn, 1997;Sattler & Altes, 1984;Teuber & Furlong, 1985, Washington & Craig, 1992. Although many different types of cultural biases can occur within an assessment, the two most often discussed relate to a test's content and its format.…”

Differential performance on the expressive one-word picture vocabulary test

“…In this instance, one may argue that the performance on the EOWPVT was specifically depressed, reflecting cultural and environmental factors that influence verbal learning/word-naming skill development. Teuber and Furlong (1985) reported similar findings of depressed EOWPVT scores for another group of minority children.…”