Selected papers on theoretical and applied linguistics
Doi
Abstract
This study presents a psychometric evaluation of the Verb Subordinates Test (VST). The VST assesses lexical competence based on knowledge of troponyms in the verb lexicon. Items are true/false statements with the structure To verbhyponym is a way to verbhypernym. Using Item Response Theory (IRT) analysis, this study examined the difficulty and discriminatory value of different items and difficulty levels of the VST. Statistical analyses showed that the VST is a promising vocabulary assessment measure with high internal consistency and good convergent validity, and that individual VST items, given their frequency range, are differentially informative across the vocabulary trait continuum
