The Use of Peabody Tool in the Assessment of Passive Vocabulary in Preschoolers

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the experience of using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary tool to assess receptive vocabulary in preschoolers. The study involved 619 Russian-speaking children aged 3–7 years (M=67.80, SD=13.73), 48.3% of whom were boys. The Peabody Picture Vocabulary test-IV (form A) was used in the study. The article analyzed differences between children of different age groups from 3.5 to 7.5 years with a step of six months. It was found that there were significant differences in the ceiling items, the total number of errors, and the raw scores in children of different age groups. No gender differences were found. An analysis of the children's performance of series and individual tasks showed that the complexity of the tasks was unevenly distributed. As a result, the methodology in its current form does not work quite as it was intended by its creators: Moscow preschoolers go through a lot of series and spend a lot of time on the implementation of the methodology, which is due to differences in the lexical systems between Russian and English. In this regard, the tool is not optimal for use in its current form; the authors of the article propose to design a local tool for the assessment of the receptive vocabulary in Russian preschoolers.