Test of adolescent semantic knowledge : a pilot study

Abstract

The present study investigated the feasibility of a beta version of Test of Adolescent Semantic Knowledge (TASK) in assessing lexical-semantic development of Cantonese-speaking adolescents with or without specific language impairment in Hong Kong. Sixty typically developing Cantonese-speaking adolescents (TD group) and 17 language-impaired Cantonese-speaking adolescents (LI group), aged between 12;01 and 17;06 studying Secondary 1 (S.1), Secondary 3 (S.3) and Secondary 5 (S.5), were recruited. A list of 300 vocabulary was located from local textbooks and dictionaries. The list was reduced to 91 vocabulary according to secondary school teachers’ judgement and feedback from a pre-pilot try-out. Three receptive vocabulary task, two expressive vocabulary tasks and a lexical inferencing task were devised to examine 5 domains: (1) literate words, (2) idioms, (3) slangs, (4) homophones, and (5) lexical inferencing strategies. The composite scores demonstrated a significant growth with grade level in the TD group. The LI group performed significantly weaker than the TD group in all five domains and the composite scores. At an individual level, with -1.5 SD as the cutoff, TASK showed 85.3%overall accuracy with 76.5% and94.1% sensitivity and specificity respectively. The results concluded that there is a continual growth of semantic knowledge during adolescence and TASK could be a feasible test for evaluating semantic knowledge of Cantonese-speaking adolescents in Hong Kong.