A preliminary study for development of screening version of REVT for the 3 years of Korean children

Objectives: Many researchers have emphasized the importance of early intervention for the at-risk children in language development. One of the most widely used children's language tests in Korea is the Receptive and Expressive Vocabulary Test (REVT). Since REVT is a comprehensive vocabulary test and covers a wide range of ages, it is often used to test children who have already shown language delays. Thus, the purpose of the present study is to conduct a preliminary study in order to develop a screening version of the REVT for 3-year-old Korean children. Methods: This study analyzed 1,754 data of 3-year-old children collected by the Korean Institute of Child Care and Education (KICCE) in 2011. Full version of REVT was administered and the data were rearranged in three versions: Full version of REVT-R (receptive version) or REVT-E (expressive version); odd-half version, which consists of odd number items from REVT-R or REVT-E; and even-half version, which consists of even number items from REVT-R or REVT-E. Results: Results of the study showed that the correlations among the three versions were very high; all three versions showed a slight positively skewed distribution; and there were no significant differences among the versions except between the full version of REVT-R and the odd version of REVT-R. Conclusion: These results indicate that, in overall, odd-half or even-half versions of REVT could be used to assess 3-year-old children's vocabulary abilities. However, further researches should be conducted to test the validity of these short versions of REVT.