TAPS-4: Test of Auditory Processing Skills - Fourth Edition

Ages: 5 through 21
Testing time: 60-90 minutes
Administration: Individual

The TAPS-4 provides information about language processing and comprehension skills across three intersecting areas: phonological processing, auditory memory and listening comprehension. These areas underpin the development of effective listening and communication skills, and are critical to the development of higher order language skills, including literacy skills.

Fourth edition features new subtests along with revisions to subtests from the TAPS-3, fully updated norms, and an expanded age range. The new subtests were also reorganized into Index and Supplemental subtests, reducing testing burden and increasing flexibility in administration.

TAPS-4 also features audio administration for the subtests in which proper pronunciation of speech sounds is critical, providing a greater degree of standardization and accuracy during the testing process.

Eleven subtests organized into three indices:

Phonological Processing Index

• Word (Pair) Discrimination: Assesses an individual's ability to discriminate whether a given word pair is the same or different
• Phonological Deletion: Assesses an individual's ability to manipulate phonemes within words
• Phonological Blending: Assesses an individual's ability to synthesize a word given the individual phonemes
• Syllabic Blending (Supplemental): Assesses an individual's ability to synthesize a nonsense word given the individual syllables

Auditory Memory Index

• Number Memory Forward: Assesses an individual's ability to recall an auditory sequence of numbers in the given order
• Word Memory: Assesses an individual's ability to recall an auditory sequence of words in the given order
• Sentence Memory: Assesses an individual's ability to recall a spoken sentence
• Number Memory Reversed (Supplemental): Assesses an individual's ability to recall an auditory sequence of numbers in the reverse order

Listening Comprehension Index

• Processing Oral Directions (without background noise): Assesses an individual's ability to process and recall oral directions when presented in quiet listening conditions
• Auditory Comprehension: Assesses an individual's ability to comprehend oral language at the sentence and narrative level, including literal recall, inference, and higher order language tasks such as idioms and figurative language
• Auditory Figure-Ground (Processing Oral Directions with background noise) (Supplemental): Assesses an individual's ability to process and recall oral directions when presented with competing background noise

TAPS-4 assesses five narrow abilities across three broad skill areas as defined in the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) theory of cognitive abilities:

Short-Term Memory

• Memory Span (MS)
• Working Memory Capacity (MW)

Auditory Processing

• Phonetics Coding (PC)
• resistance to Auditory Stimulus Distortion (UR)

Comprehension Knowledge

• Listening Ability (LS)

Administration and Scoring: TAPS-4 Index subtests can be administered in one hour or less. Scaled scores are provided for subtests; standard scores are provided for indices and the overall score. Discrepancy scores allow comparison of performance across subtests.