PDF《Title children in Hong Kong》

Thal, 1995;

Goldfield &

Snow, 2001), there can be considerable differences in the vocabulary size even among normally developing children. However, for those children who have a significantly smaller receptive and/or expressive vocabulary, they may actually be at a high risk for language impairments. The study carried out by Rescorla, Roberts &

Dahlsgaard (1997), which explored the outcome of late talkers, can provide some supportive evidence for this claim. Their findings indicated that over half of the children who had a severe delay in vocabulary development at around age two, continued to have apparent expressive language problems by age three. Thus, it is important that there are some norm-referenced assessment tools available for professionals to identify children with impaired vocabulary development. In Hong Kong, there has not been a standardized test on expressive vocabulary for preschoolers. But for English-speaking children, numerous instruments which assess their vocabulary development have been developed. For example, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT-IV) (Dunn &

Dunn, 2006) examines receptive vocabulary, while the Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (EOWPVT) (Brownell, 2000) measures expressive vocabulary. In fact, for Cantonese-speaking children, there are not many standardized language tests available........