Assessing semantic knowledge in Cantonese-speaking Adolescents

Abstract

Purpose: This study investigated the feasibility of a pilot version of Vocabulary Assessment for Cantonese- speaking Adolescents (VACA) in evaluating the vocabulary ability of Cantonese-speaking adolescents with and without language impairment (LI) in Hong Kong. Method: A list of 300 vocabularies was located from local textbooks, dictionaries, and multimedia resources. The list was reduced to 91 vocabularies according to secondary school teachers’ judgment. Three receptive tasks, two expressive tasks, and a vocabulary-learning strategy task were devised to examine five domains: (1) academic words, (2) idioms, (3) slangs, (4) homophones, and (5) lexical inferencing strategies. Sixty Cantonese-speaking adolescents with normal language (NL) and 17 with LI (aged 12;01–17;06) were tested on VACA. Results: The composite scores increased significantly with grade level in the NL group. The LI group performed significantly weaker than their matched peers in the NL group in all five domains and the composite scores. Conclusion: The results of this study demonstrated a continual growth of semantic knowledge during adolescence and VACA can be a feasible assessment tool for evaluating the vocabulary knowledge of Cantonese-speaking adolescents in Hong Kong.