About the Trabue Language Scale
In 1897 the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus had proposed the verbal completion task - sentences with one or more words missing, which the subject must supply - as a measure of intelligence. Ebbinghaus argued that filling a gap correctly required understanding the surrounding context, which involved many of the same cognitive operations as intelligent thinking generally.
Trabue's 1916 work standardized this idea for use in American schools. He developed five scales of increasing difficulty, with sentences calibrated to grades 1 through 12. Each scale contained 20-30 sentences with 2-3 blanks each. The subject filled in each blank with the best word. Scoring was done by a list of acceptable answers compiled from large normative samples.
The completion-test idea has persisted: it survives in modern verbal aptitude tests (the SAT verbal sentence completion items, GRE analogies, etc.) and in clinical neuropsychology (sentence completion as a measure of expressive language). Trabue's specific scales were used widely in the 1920s for verbal-IQ screening in schools.
The 1 subtests
Take the interactive subset
Sample items adapted from Trabue's original 1916 sentences. Items get progressively harder.
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Source
All test materials and historical content on this page are transcribed from:
Trabue, M. R. (1916). Completion Test Language Scales. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University.
Public domain. Marion Trabue was a Columbia Teachers College student who built on Ebbinghaus's 1897 completion-test concept to create a standardized school-use scale. Read it on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/completiontestla00trabrich.
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