Description
The Bankson Expressive Language Test-Third Edition (BELT-3) is an individually administered assessment of young children’s expressive language skills. It has two subtests that cover a variety of linguistic areas: Lexical Semantics (e.g., nouns, verbs, categories, functions, prepositions) and Morphology and Syntax (e.g., verb usage/tense, auxiliaries, modals, copula, comparatives/superlatives, negation, questions). The BELT-3 can be used to (a) identify young children who have expressive language impairments, (b) plan interventions, and (c) represent expressive language ability in research studies.
New Features
1. An all-new standardization sample (2014-2016) was collected.
2. The picture book illustrations have been enhanced and colourized to make them more appealing to young children.
3. Administration time has been reduced by the addition of ceiling rules in many of the test sections.
4. The Lexical Semantics subtest has been expanded to include the naming of adjectives and synonyms, as well as more difficult items to span a wider developmental range.
5. The Morphology and Syntax subtest has been expanded to include phrase expansions, simple declarative sentence forms, and compound and complex sentences to capture a wider range of grammatical structures.
6. All-new item analysis and item bias studies provide convincing evidence of content-description validity.
7. Enhanced reliability and validity studies were prepared, including diagnostic accuracy analyses, which are considered the most rigorous techniques for establishing a test’s validity. These analyses involve the computation of sensitivity and specificity indexes and the receiver operating characteristic/area under the curve (ROC/AUC) statistic.
