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

Mahurin-Smith, Jamie; DeThorne, Laura S.; Petrill, Stephen A.

doi:10.3109/02699206.2015.1016187

Cited by 3 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…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.…”

Section: Rare-word Density Is a Dialect-neutral Measurementioning

confidence: 67%

“…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.…”

Section: Limitations and Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 80%

“…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.…”

Section: In Search Of An Unbiased Test Of Advanced Vocabulary For Schmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…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.…”

Section: Low-frequency Vocabulary Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…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).…”

Section: Low-frequency Vocabulary Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

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

Mills

Mahurin-Smith

Steele

2017

Am J Speech Lang Pathol

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Section: Rare-word Density Is a Dialect-neutral Measurementioning

confidence: 67%

Section: Limitations and Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 80%

Section: In Search Of An Unbiased Test Of Advanced Vocabulary For Schmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Low-frequency Vocabulary Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Low-frequency Vocabulary Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

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

Mills

Mahurin-Smith

Steele

2017

Am J Speech Lang Pathol

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Rare Vocabulary Production in School-Age Narrators From Low-Income Communities

Mahurin-Smith

Mills

Chang

2021

LSHSS

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Purpose This study was designed to assess the utility of a tool for automated analysis of rare vocabulary use in the spoken narratives of a group of school-age children from low-income communities. Method We evaluated personal and fictional narratives from 76 school-age children from low-income communities ( M age = 9;3 [years;months]). We analyzed children's use of rare vocabulary in their narratives, with the goal of evaluating relationships among rare vocabulary use, performance on standardized language tests, language sample measures, sex, and use of African American English. Results Use of rare vocabulary in school-age children is robustly correlated with established language sample measures. Male sex was also significantly associated with more frequent rare vocabulary use. There was no association between rare vocabulary use and use of African American English. Discussion Evaluation of rare vocabulary use in school-age children may be a culturally fair assessment strategy that aligns well with existing language sample measures.

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Big Words for Little Kids: Rare Vocabulary Use by Preschool Children

Kelley,

Poholik

2023

Am J Speech Lang Pathol

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Purpose: This study presents a preliminary examination of rare vocabulary use by preschool children using a recently developed tool called the Wordlist for Expressive Rare Vocabulary Evaluation (WERVE). Method: The WERVE was used to identify rare vocabulary words language samples of 74 preschool children ( M age = 56 months). We examined the relations among rare vocabulary use, performance on norm-referenced measures of single-word vocabulary, and language sample measures of language complexity and lexical diversity. Results: Rare vocabulary use was significantly, positively correlated with standard scores on norm-referenced vocabulary measures and with language complexity and lexical diversity in language samples. Children with higher vocabulary scores used significantly more rare vocabulary than children with lower vocabulary scores. Conclusions: The WERVE shows some promise for providing information about the rare vocabulary use of preschool children. Findings from this preliminary study indicate that further research on rare vocabulary use is warranted. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.23518845

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

Cited by 3 publications

References 30 publications

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

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

Rare Vocabulary Production in School-Age Narrators From Low-Income Communities

Big Words for Little Kids: Rare Vocabulary Use by Preschool Children

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