The Rossetti is a criteria-referenced test that assesses language development in areas of expression and comprehension in children from birth to three years old.

• What is a criterion-referenced test? These tests look at the child's mastery of certain behaviors for a predetermined set of standards but do not draw comparisons to others.

Testing includes six subtests that look at different aspects of language:

• Interaction Attachment: Here, we are looking at the parent-child relationship. Does the child respond to the parent's cues?

• Pragmatics: What is the child's understanding of social communication?

• Gesture: Does the child uses gestures like pointing to convey something?

• Play: How does the child's play represent their thinking?

• Language Comprehension: What is the child's understanding of spoken language?

• Language Expression: What is the child's verbal communication like? If they are not yet verbal, what are their vocalizations and other prevocalic behaviors like?

The Rossetti relies upon observation, elicitation, or caregiver reporting in order to obtain scoring. The SLP observes the child in either free play or during an interaction with a caregiver. Then, the clinician will be able to mark off checkpoints for development that they witness. In order to obtain the ceiling level of performance, or stop testing, the child must make errors on all questions within one section.

Strengths:

• It allows for variability in scoring the results.

• It's flexible! As stated previously, the SLP can observe the child's behaviors directly or alternatively ask the parent or caregiver to report on each domain of the Rossetti.

• The Rossetti also includes severity ratings. These help clinicians describe the language impairment if there is one.

Weaknesses:

• This test does not yield standard scores, age-equivalents, or percentile ranks. This means that you are not able to make language comparisons to the child's peers of the same age.