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Abstract
The purpose of this study was to extend a previous investigation of the psychometrics of the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation–Screening Test (DELV-S) to include pre-kindergarten children (primarily African American and from low-income households). The previous study (Petscher, Connor, & Al Otaiba, 2012) included a racially and socioeconomically diverse sample of children in kindergarten through second grade. Similar to that study, two factors were found in the present study: one representing morphosyntactic ability and one representing nonword repetition ability. However, unlike the previous study, measurement invariance was not observed in the present sample. As a result, to allow for interpretation of performance in similar samples who would likely use the DELV-S, vertical scaling was used to create a new set of norms for ability scores and a new reference table for fall and spring of the pre-kindergarten school year.
Keywords diversity, language, statistical methods
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