Performance of Learning Disabled and Normal Adolescents on the Clinical Evaluation of Language Functions (CELF)

The Clinical Evaluation of Language Functions (CELF) was administered to 21 learning disabled and 21 matched normal adolescents. One subtest yielded significant differences between the two grops when both raw scores and pass-fall incidence were compared. Production subtests, as a whole, were failed more often by the learning disabled subjects than by the normal subjects; this waxs not true of processing subtests. Likewise, the learning disabled subjects exhibited more failures on subtests from the semantics category than did the matched normals; failure on subtests within the syntax and memory categories was not associated with group memberships. These results offer limited support for the construct validity of the CELF.