The Effect of Test Revision: Comparing the Performance of Preschool Children with SLI and Typical Controls on the PPVT-III and the PPVT-IV

<p><em>Purpose:</em> This study compared the performance of preschool children with SLI and controls on the PPVT-III and PPVT-IV to determine the effect of test revision on identification of language impairment. </p> <p><em>Method: </em>Twenty preschool children with SLI and 20 typically developing controls served as the exploratory group. The confirmatory group consisted of 5 children with SLI and 20 controls. Children were administered both test versions in counterbalanced order. </p> <p><em>Results: </em>As expected, children with SLI performed significantly worse than their TD peers on both test versions. The discriminate analyses identified an optimal cut-off of 103 for both tests. Using this cut-off, sensitivity of both remained consistent at 80% while specificity dropped from 75% on the PPVT-III to 70% on the PPVT-IV. The confirmatory group’s data support these findings. </p> <p><em>Conclusions: </em>The lower diagnostic accuracy of the PPVT-IV highlights the need to avoid assuming newer versions are superior to older in identifying presence or absence of language impairment. Furthermore, the high cutoff for maximizing diagnostic accuracy provides further support that children with SLI are unlikely to score as low as clinicians may expect on these tests. </p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Communication Science

Year dc:date.available

2011

Author dc:creator

• Jara, Sabrina E.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Bernard Grela; Frank Musiek
• Tammie J. Spaulding

• speech pathology
• receptive vocabulary
• standardized testing
• specific language impairment

Repository record dc:identifier

https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/gs_theses/89

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu:gs_theses-1080