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Language and Reading Research Consortium (LARRC)

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to add to our understanding of the dimensionality of oral language in children and to determine whether oral language and listening comprehension are separate constructs in children enrolled in preschool (PK) through 3rd grade.

Method: In the spring of the school year, children from 4 states (N = 1,869) completed multiple measures of oral language (i.e., expressive and receptive vocabulary and grammar) and listening comprehension as part of a larger study of the language bases of reading comprehension.

Results: Initial confirmatory factor analysis found evidence that measures of oral language and listening comprehension loaded on two separate factors in PK through 3rd grade; however, these factors were highly correlated at all grades.

Conclusions: These results suggest that oral language and listening comprehension are best characterized as a single oral language construct in PK through 3rd grade. The implications for early identification and intervention are discussed.

The question of whether oral language and listening comprehension are different constructs follows from oral language and reading research and terms such as oral language comprehension, linguistic comprehension, verbal comprehension, story comprehension, comprehension of spoken text, and listening comprehension often being used interchangeably. About 30 years ago in their seminal text on language development and disorders, Bloom and Lahey (1978) described language as encompassing form (grammar and morphology), content (semantics), and use (pragmatics). There has been general agreement among oral language researchers and clinicians about these structural components of language but less focus or consensus on the construct of listening comprehension. Oral language researchers and clinicians tend to think of listening comprehension as the construct presented in norm-referenced oral language tests by the same name; however, the content of listening comprehension measures varies substantially across tests. For example, for the Understanding Spoken Paragraphs subtest of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-Fifth Edition (CELF-5; Wiig, Semel, & Secord, 2015), the examiner reads a paragraph to the child, then the child answers questions about the paragraph's main idea, details, sequencing, and inferential information. Most would agree this is an assessment of listening comprehension. In contrast, the Listening Comprehension subtest of the Oral and Written Language Scales-Second Edition (CarrowWoolfolk, 2011) assesses children's understanding of single words, phrases, and sentences by...

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