Using Automatic Item Generation to Simultaneously Construct German and English Versions of a Word Fluency Test

Abstract

There has been an increased interest in psychometric tests that enable the comparison of test scores across different language versions. From a psychometric point of view, this endeavor requires empirical evidence on the full score equivalence of these measures. However, this aim is often rather difficult to achieve. This is particularly true for the assessment of verbal abilities. In the present article, we will outline how automatic item generation can be used to overcome some of the problems researchers face in constructing psychometric tests that are valid in multilingual assessment settings. The feasibility of this approach is illustrated in the context of the construction and empirical evaluation of a German and English word fluency test. The results of the various studies reported in this article indicate that automatic item generation enables the generation of a sufficient amount of word fluency items exhibiting a high psychometric quality in both languages. Furthermore, the item pool constructed for both languages can be linked to each other using a common set of anchor items that are identical to each other with regard to their conceptual, linguistic, and psychometric characteristics, thereby facilitating cross-lingual comparisons of word fluency performance.