Test of Language Development - Primary, Fifth Edition
TOLD-P:5 is the comprehensive language battery for the early elementary range, valued for strong sentence-level grammar subtests and competitive psychometrics.
At a glance
- Publisher
- PRO-ED
- Edition year
- 2019
- Age range
- 4;0–8;11
- Domain
- Comprehensive language
- Administration time
- 30–60 minutes
Standard scores for this battery use a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15 unless noted otherwise in the publisher manual. Always cross-reference against the current edition of the manual before clinical use — publishers update norms and scoring tables on regular cycles.
What TOLD-P:5 is
The Test of Language Development - Primary, Fifth Edition is the early elementary alternative to CELF-5 and CASL-2 in the four-to-nine age window. TOLD-P:5 is built around nine subtests organised across listening, organising, and speaking domains, plus a Spoken Language composite that functions as the headline standard score. The battery is published by PRO-ED and is widely used in private practice and university clinic settings, although it has lower district-level penetration than CELF-5. TOLD-P:5 is particularly strong on sentence-level grammar and morphology probes, which are clinically meaningful for the developmental language disorder population in the primary grades.
Subtests and structure
- Picture Vocabulary
- Relational Vocabulary
- Oral Vocabulary
- Syntactic Understanding
- Sentence Imitation
- Morphological Completion
- Word Discrimination
- Phonemic Analysis
- Word Articulation
What TOLD-P:5 measures
TOLD-P:5 measures three overlapping constructs through its three domain organisation: listening (receptive vocabulary, syntactic understanding, and word discrimination), organising (relational vocabulary and morphological completion as integration tasks), and speaking (expressive vocabulary, sentence imitation, and word articulation). The Spoken Language composite functions as a Core score for school decisions. The Sentence Imitation subtest is highly correlated with developmental language disorder identification and is one of the more clinically sensitive single tasks in the early elementary range. Morphological Completion uses an item format similar to the classic Wug test and probes productive morphology in elicited contexts.
Strengths and limitations
Strengths
- Strong sentence-level grammar coverage for the early elementary range
- Sentence Imitation is one of the most sensitive single subtests for DLD identification
- Morphological Completion probes productive morphology directly
- Competitive normative sample size and reliability for the age range
Limitations
- Lower district-level recognition than CELF-5 in many U.S. school systems
- Word Articulation subtest is too brief for clinical articulation diagnosis
- Listening domain composite can be inflated by single-word vocabulary breadth
- Age range is narrow compared with CELF-5 — does not extend past age 8;11
How language sample analysis complements TOLD-P:5
TOLD-P:5 has good sentence-level grammar coverage but it is still a structured-task battery. A connected-speech sample captures the spontaneous use of the morphology TOLD-P:5 elicits — and a child can perform well on Morphological Completion with prompted item formats while still omitting tense and agreement marking in conversational play. Pair TOLD-P:5 with a 50-utterance language sample scored for MLU-M, percent grammatical utterances, and Brown's morpheme tracking, and the combined picture is much stronger than the standardised composite alone. Sentence Imitation correlates with grammatical maturity in connected speech but it is not a substitute for measuring the speech itself, especially for IEP goal-writing where you need to anchor targets in functional production.
“When the school will only fund one comprehensive battery and the child is six, TOLD-P:5 Sentence Imitation often catches what CELF-5 will miss. Use it on private intake even if the school later runs CELF-5.”
Get the full analysis
Pair TOLD-P:5 with automated language sample analysis
Upload the audio from your session. ConductSpeech transcribes, computes MLU, NDW, PGU, and Brown's morpheme percentages, and writes a clinician-ready summary you can drop next to the TOLD-P:5 scores in your report.
Free tools that pair with TOLD-P:5
MLU Calculator
Paste a language sample and get Mean Length of Utterance in morphemes and words, total utterances, total morphemes, and the matching Brown's stage. Implements Brown (1973) morpheme counting rules and runs entirely in your browser.
Open toolBrown's Stages Lookup
Interactive reference for Brown's (1973) five stages of grammatical development. Look up a stage by child age or MLU, see the MLU range, acquired morphemes, example utterances, and clinical milestones for each stage.
Open toolLanguage Sample Worksheet
Free printable and fillable language sample analysis worksheet for speech-language pathologists. Five columns (utterance #, transcription, morpheme count, grammatical Y/N, notes), configurable row count up to 100 utterances, browser print produces a clean PDF, and an inline running summary tracks total utterances, total morphemes, and rolling MLU as you fill it in.
Open toolDSS Calculator
Free Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS) calculator for speech-language pathologists. Paste 50 sentences, tap weighted points across the eight Lee (1974) grammatical categories — Indefinite Pronouns, Personal Pronouns, Main Verbs, Secondary Verbs, Negatives, Conjunctions, Interrogative Reversals, Wh-Questions — plus the all-correct sentence point, and the calculator returns the live DSS with a per-category breakdown. Mobile-friendly tap-through grid, client-side, no sign-up.
Open toolRelated assessments
Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals, Fifth Edition
CELF-5 is the most widely used comprehensive language battery in school-age SLP practice, covering receptive and expressive language from kindergarten through age 21.
Comprehensive language · CASL-2Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language, Second Edition
CASL-2 is a flexible comprehensive language battery that lets clinicians assemble a tailored assessment from 14 subtests across lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic domains.
Expressive language · SPELT-3Structured Photographic Expressive Language Test, Third Edition
SPELT-3 is the most clinically sensitive single-task expressive language assessment for identifying DLD in the four-to-nine age range, eliciting target morphology and syntax through photographs.
References
- Newcomer, P. L., & Hammill, D. D. (2019). Test of Language Development - Primary, Fifth Edition. PRO-ED.
- Conti-Ramsden, G., Botting, N., & Faragher, B. (2001). Psycholinguistic markers for specific language impairment (SLI). Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 42(6), 741–748.
- Spaulding, T. J., Plante, E., & Farinella, K. A. (2006). Eligibility criteria for language impairment: Is the low end of normal always appropriate? LSHSS, 37(1), 61–72.