The Bankson Expressive Language Test–Third Edition (BELT-3) is an individually administered assessment of young children’s expressive language skills. It has two subtests that cover a variety of linguistic areas: Lexical Semantics (e.g., nouns, verbs, categories, functions, prepositions) and Morphology and Syntax (e.g., verb usage/tense, auxiliaries, modals, copula, comparatives/superlatives, negation, questions). The BELT-3 can be used to (a) identify young children who have expressive language impairments, (b) plan interventions, and (c) represent expressive language ability in research studies.
New Features
- An all-new standardization sample (2014–2016) was collected.
- The picture book illustrations have been enhanced and colorized to make them more appealing to young children.
- Administration time has been reduced by the addition of ceiling rules in many of the test sections.
- The Lexical Semantics subtest has been expanded to include the naming of adjectives and synonyms, as well as more difficult items to span a wider developmental range.
- The Morphology and Syntax subtest has been expanded to include phrase expansions, simple declarative sentence forms, and compound and complex sentences to capture a wider range of grammatical structures.
- All-new item analysis and item bias studies provide convincing evidence of content-description validity.
- Enhanced reliability and validity studies were prepared, including diagnostic accuracy analyses, which are considered the most rigorous techniques for establishing a test’s validity. These analyses involve the computation of sensitivity and specificity indexes and the receiver operating characteristic/area under the curve (ROC/AUC) statistic.
Technical and Statistical Characteristics of the BELT-3
The BELT-3 was normed on a sample of 684 from 29 states and 199 different zip codes. Its subtest raw scores can be converted to percentile ranks and scaled scores. The scaled scores for the two subtests are summed and converted to a composite called the Expressive Language Index. The Examiner’s Manual includes a comprehensive discussion of the test’s theoretical and research-based foundation, item development, standardization, administration and scoring procedures, norms tables, and guidelines for using and interpreting the test’s results.
The BELT-3’s internal consistency reliability coefficients are .83 and .92 for the subtests and .93 for the composite. Test–retest reliability coefficients are .91 and .88 for the subtests and .91 for the composite. Validity studies demonstrate the test’s ability to differentiate children with language impairments and those without. Specifically, an Expressive Language Index cutoff score of 90 resulted in a sensitivity of .71, a specificity of .73, and a receiver operating characteristic/area under the curve of .83 in differentiating children with language impairments from children without.
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