Dictation and vocabulary knowledge tests for adult native Chinese readers.

Abstract

To examine how individual differences in language skills affect language processing, it is essential to have good-quality tests that can assess such individual differences accurately. This study introduces a dictation test and a vocabulary knowledge test in Chinese, which aim to measure lexical expertise in proficient Chinese language users like university students. The psychometric properties of the two tests were examined with two groups of participants. In the first group, exploratory factor analyses confirmed that each of these tests was unidimensional, measuring a single underlying construct of lexical expertise. After removing some problematic items, the two tests also demonstrated satisfactory internal reliabilities. Although the test scores were only weakly correlated with self-reported measures of language proficiency, the correlation with word recognition performance was moderate. These results were successfully replicated with the second cross-validation group, confirming the reliability and convergent validity of the tests. An additional dataset further showed that the vocabulary test score was positively correlated with sentence comprehension performance. Taken together, the tests have acceptable psychometric quality and can serve as tools for examining individual differences in Chinese language processing. The tests are freely available online, and normative performance data are provided, facilitating their use in future research.