This study investigated whether children who have adequate receptive vocabulary on picture-vocabulary tests may have difficulty on tasks without picture cues and on tasks requiring them to process more than single word meaning. Language disabled and average 6- and 8-year-olds were matched on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. The research tasks assessed the ability to detect multiple word meanings in ambiguous sentences with and without picture choices and the ability to identify which word meaning was appropriate in a particular sentence context. LD students did not show average growth in these abilities over the 2-year age span. In addition, average students had significantly higher scores on all oral tasks, but did not perform significantly better than LD students on the picture task. It was concluded that oral language assessment should include sentence comprehension measures and should compare responses on picture and oral tasks.
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