Difficulty Matching Words to Meaning

This is a vocabulary assessment that measures receptive vocabulary. 

Strengths: PPVT-5 takes 10-15 minutes to complete. This benefits children who can not attend to assessments or activities for very long but allows the clinician to gain knowledge of the child’s language abilities for matching words and meanings. 

Weaknesses: There is only an English version of this test and would not be helpful for children who speak a language other than English.

This is a vocabulary assessment that measures a child’s expressive and receptive vocabulary skills. 

Strengths: ROWPVT-4 is also available in Spanish, supporting bilingual children, and it takes a short amount of time (15-25 minutes) to administer.

Weaknesses: This test measures a child's total acquired vocabulary (what they have learned thus far) and it is not a test of language proficiency (how well they can use language). 

A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning of a word. Examples of morphemes include plural -s, past tense -ed, and present tense -ing.

Morphological awareness intervention encourages children to use decoding skills to either listen or look for parts of a word that helps to tell us what a word means.

Strengths: Teaches how morphemes like plural -s, past tense -ed, and present tense -ing change the vocabulary word.

Weaknesses: English is a complex language and while we can learn and understand how morphemes change the meaning of words, it does not apply to all words and situations in the English language.

This is a language intervention that uses the frequent presentations of a target form in a meaningful context with the goal of the child repeating the target word or form of the word (Bruinsma et al., 2020)

Strengths: This intervention provides repeated exposure to the target word(s) across various contexts and environments.

Weaknesses: May feel odd to talk about the word repeatedly over a period of time and may possibly elicit repetitions without understanding the meaning of the word