Innovations in Conceptual Scoring of a Bilingual Expressive Vocabulary Measure

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Measurement

Background:

• Conceptual scoring enhances bilingual vocabulary assessment by evaluating lexical-semantic knowledge in both languages.
• Early identification of language delays or impairments in bilingual children is crucial for timely intervention.
• Existing vocabulary measures may not adequately capture the nuances of bilingual language development.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and calibrate the Multitudes Expressive Vocabulary (EVO) task, a conceptually scored measure.
• To create a screening tool for Spanish-English bilingual children's expressive vocabulary.
• To ensure the measure is linguistically appropriate and culturally sensitive.

Main Methods:

• Item design informed by linguistic literature and bilingual corpus data.
• Linguistic and cultural bias review of English and Spanish items.
• Administration to 1,219 Spanish-English bilingual children (kindergarten and first grade).
• Rasch modeling for item-level difficulty calibration in each language.
• Cross-linguistic correlation and joint calibration on a unitary scale.

Main Results:

• Item difficulties were successfully calibrated and correlated across English and Spanish.
• Evidence of unidimensionality and appropriate item fit statistics for the conceptually scored version.
• Moderately positive correlations with an existing bilingual expressive vocabulary measure confirmed criterion validity.

Conclusions:

• The Multitudes EVO task was successfully developed and calibrated using empirical data.
• The conceptually scored measure demonstrated appropriate fit statistics and construct validity.
• Multitudes EVO offers an innovative and efficient universal screening approach for bilingual students, enhancing accuracy by allowing responses in either English or Spanish.