Children’s Therapy Unit at Good Samaritan Hospital

The purpose of this article is to inform researchers and prac-titioners about potential challenges in the selection, adminis-tration, and interpretation of results of measures of vocabu-lary assessment when working with deaf and hard-of-hearing children. This article reviews methods that can be used to assess vocabulary of children through the age of 5 years, in-cluding naturalistic observation, parent report measures, and standardized vocabulary tests. The authors also describe pro-cedures to assess word-learning processes available to chil-dren to facilitate vocabulary acquisition. General cautions regarding the use of assessment tools with deaf and hard-of-hearing children are reviewed, as well as cautions for speci-fic assessment measures. Finally, based on available research, suggestions are offered regarding what each assessment test can tell us about deaf and hard-of-hearing children’s vocabu