| Abstract: | The performance of 152 children in the age range 7 years 5 months to 7 years 11 months on a battery comprising the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities (ITPA), the English Picture Vocabulary Test 2 (EPVT), a test of auditory discrimination, a sentence repetition test and an orally administered verbal intelligence test was compared with the complexity and fluency of spoken language recorded from each child. Only a moderate correlation was found between the ITPA total score and the length‐complexity index (LCI) from the language samples. Moderate correlations were found between the LCI and several auditory‐vocal channel subtests from the ITPA; however, with the influence of verbal intelligence partialled out most of these were reduced to low or nonsignificant levels. The scores from the Manual Expression subtest in the visual‐motor channel were found to correlate as highly with LCI as did the ITPA total score. This relationship was maintained to two situations, (i) when the factor of verbal intelligence was controlled statistically, (ii) when a sub‐sample of subjects within a narrow IQ range was selected for separate analysis. The Verbal Expression subtest also showed moderate correlation with LCI in four out of five analyses, thus lending support to the “process” construct in the ITPA model. No connection was found between any of the psycholinguistic subtests and fluency of language production. The validity of the ITPA as a test of oral language performance was questioned. |
