Abstract:
The Screening Test for Auditory Comprehension of Language (STACL) is designed to serve three purposes for children ages 3-6: To assess basic competence in language, to identify children who need more complete testing of auditory comprehension with the Test for Auditory Comprehension of Language (TACL), and to establish the dominant language of the child. The STACL can be administered to groups in either English or Spanish and is composed of twenty-five plates of line drawings which can be used as non-verbal stimulus items. Each plate contains three pictures representing referential categories and contrasts that can be signaled by form classes and function words, grammatical categories, and syntactic structure. For testing structural contrasts, one picture represents the referent for the linguistic form being tested; the others, referents for the contrasting linguistic forms. Where there are only two contrasting structures and corresponding referents, the third picture is a decoy. In testing grammatical forms, the illustrations avoid redundancy in signaling the grammatical contrast. When the STACL is used to evaluate language proficiency in English and Spanish with the same children, the test should be administered first in the language in which the child seems to be least competent. Raw scores are converted to percentile ranks, and norms were established on 418 English-speaking children. Separate norms do not exist for Spanish-speaking children. Children who score under the 10th percentile should be retested using the TACL. Test-retest reliability has been estimated at r = .60.