An examination of cultural-linguistic influences on PPVT-4 performance in African American and Hispanic preschoolers from low-income communities

ABSTRACT

In this study, we examined potential influences of cultural and linguistic background on PPVT-4 performance in a community sample of preschool-age children from low-SES households. We did this by evaluating PPVT-4 item-level performance across African American and Hispanic children from low-income families. We compared PPVT-4 item-level performance for 332 Hispanic and African American children (M_age = 48 months) using Wald chi-square tests of independence. There were clinically significant differences in accuracy on 14 PPVT-4 test items with most favouring the African American group. We then looked at the relationship between African American English use and PPVT-4 scores for a subset of 113 African American children (M_age = 49.9 months). A correlational analysis with PPVT-4 standard scores and a dialect density measure (DDM) in narratives revealed no association between these measures. We concluded that there were potential cultural-linguistic biases in PPVT-4 items that were not explained by income alone for the young Hispanic children.

KEYWORDS:

• African American English
• Spanish-Influenced English
• socioeconomic status
• vocabulary assessment
• test bias

Acknowledgments

Funding for data collection was provided by the US Department of Education, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, Early Reading First Program Grant S359B08008. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of the US Department of Education or other members of the research team. Partial funding for analyses was provided by NIH-NIGMS (U54GM104938), an IDeA-CTR to the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center (OUHSC), the Gullatt Professorship of Speech Pathology at OUSHC, and the Magellan Scholar Program at the University of South Carolina. We are grateful to the children and agencies who participated in this research, examiners who assisted with data collection and students who assisted with the project.

Disclosure of interest

The authors report no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the US Department of Education, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, Early Reading First Program [Grant S359B08008];NIH-NIGMS [U54GM104938].