DELV-ing Into the Psychometrics of Dialect: An Item-Level Analysis With School-Aged African American Children

PURPOSE: Measuring language proficiency in the presence of nonmainstream dialect variation is a crucial task for clinicians and language researchers. Evaluations of the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation-Screening Test (DELV-ST) have suggested that its items do not conform to the recommended scoring rules. The current article evaluates the items from both parts of the DELV-ST. METHOD: Participants included 853 African American students in Grades 1-5. We used a priori confirmatory factor models to evaluate the published structure versus linguistically based blocks of items for the two parts of the DELV-ST: Language Variation (15 items) and Diagnostic Risk (17 items). We also evaluated models of full multinomial scoring of all item choices. RESULTS: = .28-.57). CONCLUSIONS: The items of the DELV-ST did not function well as unidimensional measures of their intended parts in the current sample. Some items and many responses did not function adequately, suggesting that for a better understanding of dialect, a wider variety of linguistic tasks with diagnostically informative responses may be needed. Relations between the DELV-ST and language or reading are therefore questionable. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.33245943.