A one-word vocabulary test.

Beth Lawrence and Deena Seifert

• Age Range:  7 through 17 years.
• Time:  About 20 minutes
• Restricted Use:  Level B

The TOSR assesses the breadth (number of lexical entries one has) and depth (extent of semantic representation for each known word) of vocabulary knowledge, without taxing expressive language skills.  Breadth and depth are both important for literacy.  Breadth relates to early decoding, and depth to later comprehension. This new assessment provides an important resource for individuals assessing children with possible language and literary deficits.

Information obtained from the TOSR can provide educators, psychologists and speech-language pathologists with information on basic receptive vocabulary knowledge, as well as higher-order thinking and reasoning, in the semantic domain.

Developed by two practicing speech-language pathologists, the TOSR builds on their successful vocabulary instruction app, InferCabulary.  It includes 90 sets of four high-quality color photograph that reflect a vocabulary word, in a variety of contexts.  The individual must use semantic reasoning to analyze the pictures, and then select the single word (from a choice of four) that best represents the multiple contexts of the word represented by all of the images.

The TOSR assesses three narrow abilities defined in the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) theory of cognitive abilities:

1.  Lexical Knowledge (VL)—the extent of vocabulary that can be understood, in terms of correct word meanings
2. Induction (I)—the ability to discover the underlying characteristic that governs a problem, or set of materials
3. General Sequential Reasoning (RG)—the ability to start with stated rules, premises or conditions, and engage in one or more steps, to reach a solution to a novel problem

Administration and Scoring

The TOSR incorporates the easy administration and scoring of traditional one-word vocabulary assessments.  Age-related starting point, and ceilings, ensure that only a subset of items will need to be administers.  Raw scores are reported as standard scores, percentile ranks and age equivalents.

It was normed on a nationally-representative sample of 1117 individuals, including individuals with learning disabilities, language impairments, ADHD and Autism.

The TOSR Kit includes Test Plates, 25 Record Forms and a Manual.