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American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology logoLink to American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology
. 2023 Jun 5;32(4):1610–1619. doi: 10.1044/2023_AJSLP-22-00352

Comparing Scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and Receptive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test in Preschoolers With and Without Hearing Loss

Erin M Ingvalson a,✉, Lynn K Perry b, Mark VanDam c, Tina M Grieco-Calub d
PMCID: PMC10473386  PMID: 37276459

Abstract

Purpose:

We sought to compare raw scores, standard scores, and age equivalences on two commonly used vocabulary tests, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) and the Receptive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (ROWPVT).

Method:

Sixty-two children, 31 with hearing loss (HL) and 31 with normal hearing (NH), were given both the PPVT and ROWPVT as part of an ongoing longitudinal study of emergent literacy development in preschoolers with and without HL. All children were between 3 and 4 years old at administration, and the two tests were administered within 3 weeks of each other. Both tests were given again 6 months later. Standard scores and age equivalencies were calculated for both tests using published guidelines.

Results:

There was no significant effect of test for any of our analyses. However, there was a main effect of time, with both standard scores and age equivalencies being significantly higher at the second test. Children with NH had significantly higher standard scores and age equivalencies than children with NH, but there was no interaction between hearing status and time, suggesting that the two groups were growing at the same rate.

Conclusions:

Clinicians can be comfortable administering both the PPVT and ROWPVT to estimate children's vocabulary levels, but there may be practice effects when administering the tests twice within a calendar year. These data also indicate that children with HL continue to lag behind their peers with NH on vocabulary development.

Supplemental Material:

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.23232848

Children's vocabulary development is fundamental to their future language abilities. For example, children with larger vocabularies have better phonological awareness (Rvachew, 2006) and better morphological sensitivity (Duncan, 2018; Mahony et al., 2000). When learning to read, vocabulary is a leading indicator on reading comprehension (Brimo et al., 2018; Quinn et al., 2015). In addition to the fact that vocabulary is related to a host of other language abilities, vocabulary is a particularly easy skill to assess. The strong relation between vocabulary and other language skills suggests that, in practice, vocabulary can be a convenient index of a child's developmental level. Given the importance of vocabulary for future linguistic performance, clinicians and researchers need valid and reliable means of measuring vocabulary knowledge. However, standardized assessments of receptive vocabulary are often developed and normed for typically developing, typically hearing children rather than children with communication disorders such as hearing loss (HL), who may be at elevated likelihood for language delays, or have atypical developmental trajectories in their language development. Although such assessments are frequently used to assess vocabulary in children with HL, it is unknown whether different tests yield similar characterizations of delay and growth trajectory in this population. Here, we compare the vocabulary trajectories of preschoolers with and without HL as measured by two commonly administered receptive vocabulary assessments—the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test–Fifth Edition (PPVT-5; Dunn, 2019) and the Receptive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test–Fourth Edition (ROWPVT-4; Martin & Brownell, 2011).

The Importance of Vocabulary in Development

There is strong support for the idea that children's vocabulary abilities are related to both their oral and written language skills. In particular, there is a bidirectional association between vocabulary and phonological development. For example, while children more readily learn new words made up of sounds that they can already produce (e.g., Leonard, 1989), children's vocabulary knowledge promotes children's perception of phonological categories (e.g., Swingley, 2019). These associations between lexical and phonological processes can have cascading influences on long-term literacy outcomes as well. Having a large vocabulary gives children more information about the sounds that make up words, which can help them process and subsequently learn new words that they encounter in spoken language (Morgan & Demuth, 1996; Pierrehumbert, 2003) and decode and learn new words in written language (Duff et al., 2015; Lee, 2011).

This bidirectional association between vocabulary and phonological sensitivity therefore is one factor that contributes to the so-called rich-get-richer or “Matthew effect” (Duff et al., 2015; Merton & Merton, 1968), such that children who know more words are more successful at learning new words. Thus, vocabulary is associated with long-term literacy outcomes, such as reading comprehension, both because it supports the phonological sensitivity skills needed to decode words, and because knowing more words allows a child to recognize the meanings of familiar words and infer the meanings of unfamiliar words they decode from context. Furthermore, as many children with HL who use cochlear implants or hearing aids and are learning a spoken language have delays or difficulties in vocabulary development, phonological sensitivity, and reading, it is important to accurately measure vocabulary in this population.

Assessing Receptive Vocabulary in Children With and Without HL

In much of the literature, vocabulary is often quantified as receptive vocabulary, which is larger than a child's expressive vocabulary and precedes expressive vocabulary in development (e.g., Fenson et al., 1994). Additionally, tests of receptive vocabulary do not have the same kinds of performance demands as tests of expressive vocabulary, which require children to pronounce a given word sufficiently correctly as to be recognized by the test administrator—a skill that can be extra challenging for young children with communicative disorders, including HL. We similarly focus on receptive vocabulary here. Two common standardized tests that have been reported in the literature are the PPVT-5 (henceforth, PPVT) and the ROWPVT-4 (henceforth, ROWPVT). Both tests use a four-alternative forced-choice design wherein the child chooses the picture that best represents the stimulus word spoken by the examiner. Both tests also establish basal and ceiling metrics and utilize those metrics to establish the raw score on the test. However, the rules for establishing basal and ceiling metrics differ between the two tests: The PPVT requires three consecutive correct responses for the basal versus eight consecutive correct responses for the ROWPVT; the PPVT requires six consecutive incorrect responses for the ceiling versus six out of eight incorrect responses for the ROWPVT. The PPVT also has more test items than the ROWPVT (240 and 190, respectively). Our experience administering the two tests indicates that the PPVT takes longer to administer, although publisher estimates of administration times for both tests are 10–15 min.

Both the PPVT and ROWPVT have been normed on and extensively used with typically developing children. Both tests have also been used with a variety of children identified as having a communication disorder or identified as being at an elevated likelihood of developing a communication disorder. Reliable and valid measurement of vocabulary in children with an elevated risk of a communication disorder is particularly important, because these children often have smaller vocabularies (McGregor et al., 2013, 2021) and greater weaknesses in word learning than their typically developing peers (Gray, 2004; Riches et al., 2005). Consistent with these findings, children with early onset HL often show lower overall vocabulary levels and shallower slopes of vocabulary growth than children with normal hearing (NH; Ganek et al., 2012; Lund, 2016, 2019; Nott et al., 2009). Word learning studies have demonstrated that children with HL require more presentations to learn a novel word than do their peers with NH (Houston et al., 2012; Walker & McGregor, 2013). Perhaps not surprisingly, then, children with HL also show weaker reading comprehension than children with NH (Mayberry et al., 2011; Wendt et al., 2015; Worsfold et al., 2018), a performance deficit that can likely be at least partially attributed to children with HL's lower vocabulary levels.

Although there is no formal normalized estimate of the PPVT or ROWPVT, specifically for children with HL, there is extensive precedent and reporting of using both the PPVT (Cupples et al., 2018; Davidson et al., 2021; Tomblin et al., 2020) and, somewhat less frequently, the ROWPVT (Halliday & Bishop, 2005; Lund et al., 2015; Malhotra et al., 2022) with this special population. A literature search for references to the PPVT or ROWPVT for children with or without HL demonstrates that the PPVT is cited approximately 150 times as often at the ROWPVT (see Supplemental Material S1 for search terms and results). The overrepresentation of the PPVT may lead to the impression among some researchers and clinicians that PPVT and vocabulary are essentially synonymous, and other vocabulary tests may be viewed as of less utility. Alternatively, in some published reports, there is no distinction made between the ROWPVT and PPVT, with the standard score from either test used as a language measure variable (see Frazier et al., 2021; Luckman et al., 2020) or with no distinction made between the tests as examples of probes into vocabulary (see Aikens et al., 2020), suggesting that some researchers may see the tests as interchangeable. It is therefore worth exploring whether the ROWPVT produces scores comparable with the PPVT for both typically developing children and children with a communication disorder (in this case, HL) both for clinicians who may not wish to use the PPVT and to accurately interpret research that has used the tests interchangeably.

To the best of our knowledge, there exists only one published report comparing the two tests. Ukrainetz and Blomquist looked at the validity of the PPVT-3 and ROWPVT-1 relative to natural language samples (Ukrainetz & Blomquist, 2002). Twenty-eight children participated, ranging in age from 3;11 to 6;0 (years;months). Standard scores for the PPVT-3 and ROWPVT-1 were correlated, r = 0.79 and were statistically similar for the participants. Despite this lack of difference between scores, the ROWPVT-1 standard scores appeared to be more sensitive to metrics obtained from naturalistic language samples. Specifically, ROWPVT-1 standard scores were more strongly correlated with number of different words (0.61 vs. 0.36 for the PPVT-3), with total number of words (0.46 vs. 0.12 for the PPVT-3), and with mean length of utterance (0.51 vs. 0.17 for the PPVT-3). Ukrainetz and Blomquist interpreted these data as indicating lower criterion validity for the PPVT-3 than for the ROWPVT-1 relative to natural language samples. There is some question, however, regarding the validity of using an expressive language sample as an indicator of the validity of a receptive vocabulary measure (Gibson et al., 2013). Indeed, receptive vocabulary is more often used as a means to estimate expressive vocabulary (Dale & Fenson, 1996; Fenson et al., 1994). Additionally, these data do not speak to differences between the tests on age equivalences, analyses that would not have been possible given the age range in their sample. Finally, the PPVT has undergone two revisions and the ROWPVT has undergone three revisions since 2002. Therefore, an explicit comparison of the current versions is warranted.

The aim of this report is to compare the scores obtained by the PPVT and ROWPVT in a sample of typically developing preschoolers and a matched sample of preschoolers with HL. These data were obtained as part of a larger, ongoing longitudinal study of emergent literacy development in preschoolers with HL compared with their peers with NH (Ingvalson et al., 2020). All children enrolled in the current longitudinal study were administered both the PPVT and ROWPVT within 3 weeks of each other, allowing for within-child comparisons. All children were between 3- and 4-year-olds when enrolled, facilitating comparisons of standard scores and age equivalencies for the two tests (cf., Ukrainetz & Blomquist, 2002). All children also completed a second assessment, administered 6 months later, allowing vocabulary growth to be considered in those children. There are three research questions: (a) Are there differences between PPVT and ROWPVT standard scores? (b) Does child hearing status influence PPVT and ROWPVT standard scores? (c) Are there differences age equivalencies provided by the PPVT and ROWPVT?

Method

Participants

Thirty-one children with HL and 31 children with NH completed T1 and T2 assessments. All children were between 3 and 4 years old at enrollment. Children with HL ranged from 36 months to 52 months (M = 43.06 months, SD = 3.89); children with NH ranged from 37 to 49 months (M = 43.26 months, SD = 3.58). Children were evenly distributed throughout the age range. Of the children with HL, nine were cochlear implant users, 17 were hearing aid users, and three used a bone-conduction device (device type was not reported for two children). All children with HL were being educated using a listening and spoken language curriculum; all children were exclusively spoken language users. Children with HL were recruited from preschools specializing in a listening and spoken language approach. Hearing thresholds were not obtained for the current project; however, each child completed a “listening check” at the beginning of each school day to ensure that they were able to access spoken language. These schools also enroll peers with NH, and five children were recruited from these schools. The remaining children with NH were recruited from preschools for children who are typically developing. Children were recruited via flyers and letters sent home. Recruitment and consent were in alignment with the institutional review boards of the University of Washington, University of Miami, Rush University, and Washington State University, which provided institutional review board approval.

The children with HL had all received early intervention services for hearing, speech, and language prior to enrolling in preschool. Early intervention services were provided by specialists affiliated with the preschools. Thirty-seven children (21 with HL) were female. Summary demographics are shown in Table 1. Education levels were higher for parents of children with NH than for parents of children with HL, which was not unexpected (e.g., Fink et al., 2007). However, only approximately half of parents (18 families of a child with HL; 16 families of a child with NH) opted to provide socioeconomic information, limiting the utility of these data. Nonresponses were equally distributed across recruitment sites, and there was no difference in socioeconomic estimates across sites.

Table 1.

Demographic information for the children in this study.

Characteristic HL NH
n (n males) 31 (10) 31 (15)
M age at enrollment in months (SD) 43.06 (3.89) 43.26 (3.58)
Hispanic 17% 20%
Asian 8% 5%
Black or African American 0% 0%
White 71% 90%
More than one race 21% 5%
Mothers with bachelor's degree or higher 68% 89%
Fathers with bachelor's degree or higher 74% 100%
M age at identification in months (SD) 2.93 (4.96) —
M age at 1st amplification in months (SD) 9.78 (10.28) —
n CI users 11 —
n HA users 17 —
n bone conduction users 3 —
n bimodal CI—HA users 0 —
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Note. Dashes indicate not applicable. HL = hearing loss; NH = normal hearing; CI = cochlear implant; HA = hearing aid.

Materials and Procedures

Both the ROWPVT-4 and PPVT-5 were administered at the T1 and T2 assessments. Assessments were administered using standard procedures. Specifically, stimulus plates were positioned in front of the child with the examiner opposite. Examiners presented words using the provided prompts and administered the practice items prior to beginning the assessments. Basals and ceilings were established according to the manual (ROWPVT: eight consecutive responses correct for the basal, six out of eight incorrect responses for the ceiling; PPVT: three consecutive correct responses for the basal, six consecutive responses incorrect for the ceiling).

Statistics

Standard scores were calculated as a function of child's age at test and raw score using the lookup tables in the manual. Age equivalencies were calculated as a function of raw score using the provided lookup tables. Age equivalencies are provided in years;months and were converted to months for the analyses. It is worth noting that the PPVT-5 and ROWPVT-4 were normed on a large sample of children with NH, which may not be representative regarding vocabulary development for children who are HL (Lund, 2016). However, standard vocabulary scores for children with HL are regularly reported in the literature as indicators of whether children are performing “in the normal range” and understanding whether standard scores differ between the two tests is therefore important for understanding the literature. Data were analyzed via analyses of variance (ANOVAs).

Results

Standard Scores at T1 and T2

Children were grouped by hearing status (HL or NH). To evaluate whether standard scores differed, test type, hearing status, and time at test were entered into a mixed-model ANOVA where test type and test time were the within-subjects factor. We found a significant main effect of hearing status, F(1, 60) = 28.45, p < .001. Children with NH had higher standard scores than children with HL (NH M = 110.38, SD = 14.76; HL M = 94.37, SD = 13.47). There was a main effect of time, F(1, 60) = 7.22, p = .01. Scores were higher at T2 (M = 103.90, SD = 16.09) than at T1 (M = 100.85, SD = 16.27). There was no main effect of test nor any significant interactions (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

2 box-and-whisker plots provide standard scores for the P P V T and the R O W V P T for children with hearing loss or with normal hearing at T 1 and T 2. Standard scores are marked on the vertical axis from 60 to 160 with intervals of 20. The following values are for the mean, first quartile, third quartile, minimum and maximum, respectively. Graph for T 1. P P V T. Normal hearing: 105, 99, 120, 72, 139. Outlier, 160. Hearing loss: 85, 82, 95, 70, 112. Outliers, 117, 120. R O W P V T. Normal hearing: 110, 105, 119, 82, 130. Outlier, 72. Hearing loss: 98, 88, 100, 78, 120. Outliers, 58, 62. Graph for T 2. P P V T. Normal hearing: 109, 100, 120, 75, 138. Outlier, 160. Hearing loss: 90, 85, 100, 73, 118. Outliers, 60, 122, 135. R O W P V T. Normal hearing: 115, 120, 108, 90, 135. Hearing loss: 95, 90, 108, 72, 130. All values are estimated.

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Standard scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) and Receptive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (ROWVPT) by children with hearing loss or with normal hearing at T1 and T2.

Age Equivalent Scores

Our next set of analyses compared age equivalency scores across the two tests. The PPVT does not provide age equivalency scores below 2;6; estimates below age 2;6 are listed in the table as < 2;6. For the analyses, any age equivalency score listed as < 2;6 was coded as 2;5. Six children (five with HL) were coded as having PPVT age equivalencies as 2;5. No recoding was necessary for the ROWPVT as age equivalences are provided down to 1;1. As with the standard scores, we entered the age equivalencies into a mixed-model ANOVA where hearing status was the between-subjects factors and test type and test time were the within subjects factors. There was a main effect of hearing status, F(1, 60) = 28.92, p < .001. Age equivalencies were higher for the NH children (M = 55.37 months, SD = 13.11) than for the children with HL (M = 42.39 months, SD = 10.62). There was also a main effect of time, F(1, 60) = 94.65, p < .001. Age equivalencies were higher at T2 (M = 53.12 months, SD = 13.11) than at T1 (M = 44.64 months, SD = 12.70). There was no main effect of test nor any significant interactions (see Figure 2).

Figure 2.

2 box-and-whisker plots for age equivalencies on the P P V T and the R O W P V T by children with hearing loss or with normal hearing at T 1 and T 2. Age equivalence numbers, in months, are marked on the vertical axis, from 20 to 90 with intervals of 10. The following values are for the mean, first quartile, third quartile, minimum and maximum, respectively. Graph for T 1. P P V T. Normal hearing: 46, 40, 58, 29, 81. Hearing loss: 34, 32, 40, 30, 51. Outlier, 57. R O W P V T. Normal hearing: 55, 43, 63, 22, 73. Hearing loss: 40, 32, 48, 18, 63. Graph for T 2. P P V T. Normal hearing: 55, 48, 63, 29, 78. Outlier, 92. Hearing loss: 41, 38, 48, 29, 57. Outliers, 70, 78. R O W P V T. Normal hearing: 63, 54, 72, 38, 82. Hearing loss: 50, 42, 55, 28, 76. All values are estimated.

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Age equivalencies on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) and Receptive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (ROWPVT) by children with hearing loss or with normal hearing at T1 and T2.

Device Type

To explore whether device type influenced children's vocabulary levels, we first limited the sample to just the children who used hearing aids (17 children) and who used cochlear implants (11 children). Entering these data into a mixed-model ANOVA where device type was the within-subjects factor and test type and test time were the between-subjects factors revealed only a main effect of time F(1, 24) = 8.62, p = .01. As in the other analyses, scores at T2 (M = 96.19, SD = 14.60) were higher than scores at T1 (M = 91.69, SD = 13.13). There was no main effect of device type nor any significant interactions (see Figure 3).

Figure 3.

2 box-and-whisker plots provide standard scores for the P P V T and the R O W V P T by children who use hearing aids and children who use cochlear implants at T 1 and T 2. Standard scores are marked on the vertical axis from 60 to 120 with intervals of 20. The following values are for the mean, first quartile, third quartile, minimum and maximum, respectively. Graph for T 1. P P V T. Hearing aid: 86, 83, 93, 78, 102. Outlier, 122. Cochlear implant: 83, 87, 100, 77, 108. Outliers, 121. R O W P V T. Hearing aid: 93, 84, 100, 77, 119. Cochlear implant: 98, 88, 100, 78, 120. Graph for T 2. P P V T. Hearing aid: 89, 84, 100, 75, 119. Outlier, 124. Cochlear implant: 86, 83, 103, 60, 132. R O W P V T. Hearing aid: 95, 94, 114, 82, 128. Cochlear implant: 98, 88, 110, 72, 115. All values are estimated.

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Standard scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) and Receptive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (ROWVPT) for children who use hearing aids and children who use cochlear implants at T1 and T2.

Discussion

We found no significant differences between the tests when comparing their standard scores. Similarly, we found no differences between the ROWPVT and PPVT's calculation of age equivalencies. There was also no difference between the scores obtained by children who used hearing aids and children who used cochlear implants. However, there was a significant effect of time for both standard scores and age equivalencies, potentially indicating a susceptibility to practice effects.

We interpret these findings to support the use of either the ROWPVT or the PPVT in clinical practice, although caution should be used if testing vocabulary frequently. The PPVT includes two test forms, which are meant to mitigate retest effects. Children in our study receive a different PPVT version on each assessment, and version order is counter-balanced by participant. Despite these precautions, the PPVT was shown here to be as susceptible to test–retest effects as the ROWPVT, evidenced by the lack of a Test × Time interaction. Although it is possible that the increases in scores from T1 to T2 are reflective of vocabulary growth, which can be very rapid in the preschool period (Dale & Fenson, 1996; Frank et al., 2017; Song et al., 2015), we note that standard scores are meant to be sensitive to age-typical growth and we would not expect a significant change across testing sessions.

The PPVT-5, published in 2018, is more recently updated than the ROWPVT-4, published in 2011. The more recent revision of the PPVT is reflected in the inclusion of words such as “emoji,” “texting,” and “tablet.” Although inclusion of these words may be reflective of more modern language usage, their inclusion does not significantly impact estimates of children's vocabulary relative to the established norms. Thus, concerns about updated vocabulary items need not drive clinicians' test selection, provided the most recent versions of the selected test are used.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that SLPs prefer the PPVT to the ROWPVT. SLPs familiar with both tests reported a belief that the larger item inventory of the PPVT provides a better indication of children's vocabulary knowledge. A preference for the PPVT is supported by its much higher citation rate in the literature (see Supplemental Material S1). We note that not only does the PPVT have a larger item inventory but it also has more stringent ceiling rules, requiring six consecutive incorrect responses. Our experience indicates that this rule leads to longer testing times, as children will often know (or correctly guess) one item out of the six. In this instance, rules that allow for two correct responses (or guesses) within the set of incorrect responses, as in the ROWPVT, can shorten testing time. Having a child progress through more test items may give the impression that the test is better at capturing the child's word knowledge. However, these differences in raw scores are unlikely to be clinically significant, as the calculated standard scores and age equivalencies will not differ across tests. Clinicians may continue to opt to administer the PPVT due to higher familiarity with the test, but it is unlikely to provide a meaningfully different vocabulary estimate relative to the ROWPVT.

Of course, there are many reasons beyond item type and item inventory that might drive a clinician's preference for one test over another. For example, the fact that the ROWPVT offers age equivalencies down to 1;0 could be beneficial when working with children who are expected to have very low vocabulary levels, with the caveat that age equivalencies can be difficult to accurately interpret (Maloney & Larrivee, 2007; Sullivan et al., 2014). Similarly, the ROWPVT is normed for children as young as 2;0, whereas the PPVT is normed for children as young as 2;6, allowing for earlier assessment of children's vocabulary, which could be important for early identification of communication disorders. Alternatively, the PPVT provides a wider range of standard scores, ranging from 20 to 160 relative to < 55 to > 145 for the ROWPVT, which may make it more appropriate for individuals with very low or very high vocabularies. Additionally, some tests may be more amenable to children with communication disorders. We note that, although there was no significant interaction between hearing status and test, visual inspection suggests that children with HL may have higher standard scores and higher age equivalencies on the ROWPVT than on the PPVT (this is most apparent in Figure 3). We can only speculate as to the possible reasons for this. One possible reason is the fact that equivalent standard scores on the two tests require fewer correct responses (i.e., lower raw scores) for the ROWPVT than the PPVT, and lower standard scores on the PPVT may be reflective of fatigue effects. Another possible reason is that differences in the norming protocols for the two tests, including the lower norming range for the ROWPVT, may make the ROWPVT more beneficial for children with HL. Our data do not provide an indication as to whether the PPVT or ROWPVT is a more accurate representation of vocabulary in children with HL, and we leave this for future researchers and clinicians to determine. Additionally, we suggest that the two tests should be compared in additional clinical populations to determine whether the ROWPVT leads to higher scores across a variety of communication disorders.

Our data do not speak to expressive vocabulary tests. Both the ROWPVT and PPVT are paired to an expressive test, the Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (EOWPVT) and the Expressive Vocabulary Test (EVT), respectively. Expressive tests are correlated with their paired receptive tests, with a correlation coefficient of .76 for the PPVT and EVT (Pearson Clinical) and .89 for the ROWPVT and EOWPVT (Michalec & Henninger, 2011).

In a recent study investigating the impacts of early intervention services on children with HL, Rudge et al. (2022) found that children's vocabulary levels were within normal limits. Our findings are in line with these data, as the children with HL in our sample had standard scores within normal limits for both the PPVT and ROWPVT. However, although scores were within the normal range, they were significantly lower than the standard scores for the children with NH. This is also consistent with previous research, where multiple studies have found significant deficits in vocabulary levels for children with HL relative to children with NH (for a meta-analysis, see Lund, 2016). Both groups of children showed growth in vocabulary between T1 and T2, but they grew at similar rates, evidenced by the lack of an interaction between test time and hearing status. Because children with HL and children with NH are growing their vocabularies at similar rates, it is unlikely that the children with HL will catch up (Nicholas & Geers, 2007; Nittrouer et al., 2012). As these assessments were only 6 months apart, it is possible that children with HL will show steeper rates of growth as preschool progresses that would allow them to catch up with their peers with NH, but it is more likely that additional intervention will be needed if vocabulary levels for children with HL are to match those of children with NH (Alqraini & Paul, 2020; Antia et al., 2021; Lund, 2018; Moeller, 2000).

Limitations

Socioeconomic data were collected via parental questionnaire and approximately half of families declined to provide these data. Not only does this limit the sample size for SES but it is also probable that families who choose not to provide these data differ from those that do. Difficulties recruiting and retaining racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse samples are well documented (Huer & Saenz, 2003; Lander et al., 2019), limiting our ability to determine how these factors relate to vocabulary development for children with HL. We will continue to seek to recruit a representative, diverse sample, and to obtain accurate estimates of socioeconomic status, which we hope will allow us to further explore these questions in the future.

Although data collection is ongoing, at this time, only T1 and T2 assessments were available. We therefore cannot make any statements regarding longitudinal vocabulary growth. Additional time points would allow us to determine whether vocabulary growth rates for preschoolers with HL allow them to catch up to their peers with NH, data that could have important implications for intervention.

Conclusions

We found no significant differences between the PPVT-5 and ROWPVT-4 on standard score or age equivalencies. Although children with NH consistently had higher scores than children with HL, within each hearing-status, grouping standard scores were equivalent. However, we found a significant effect of test time on both standard scores and age equivalencies, potentially indicative of practice effects. We argue that clinicians can therefore be confident that both tests provide a valid estimate of children's vocabulary knowledge, at least for children who are typically developing and children with HL who are spoken language users.

Data Availability Statement

The data sets generated during this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental Material S1. Number of references found for literature searches of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) and Receptive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (ROWPVT or ROW-PVT).
Click here for additional data file. (241.5KB, pdf)

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by NIH grant R01DC017984 (PIs: Ingvalson, Grieco-Calub, Perry, VanDam). We wish to thank Child's Voice, The Debbie School, The HOPE School of Spokane, Listen & Talk, and the McGaw YMCA for assisting in data collection. We also wish to thank the families whose children participated.

Funding Statement

This work was supported by NIH grant R01DC017984 (PIs: Ingvalson, Grieco-Calub, Perry, VanDam). We wish to thank Child's Voice, The Debbie School, The HOPE School of Spokane, Listen & Talk, and the McGaw YMCA for assisting in data collection.

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Associated Data

This section collects any data citations, data availability statements, or supplementary materials included in this article.

Supplementary Materials

Supplemental Material S1. Number of references found for literature searches of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) and Receptive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (ROWPVT or ROW-PVT).
Click here for additional data file. (241.5KB, pdf)

Data Availability Statement

The data sets generated during this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Articles from American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology are provided here courtesy of American Speech-Language-Hearing Association

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