CASL-2 Score Interpretation: Understanding Your Child's Results

Your child's evaluation includes CASL-2 results, and the score report looks different from what you expected. The Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language, Second Edition organizes results through a General Language Ability Index, other index scores, and individual test scores. Here's how to read it.

How CASL-2 Scores Are Organized

The CASL-2 reports a General Language Ability Index and five other index scores:

• Receptive Language — understanding spoken language
• Expressive Language — producing spoken language
• Lexical/Semantic — word knowledge, word relationships, and vocabulary depth
• Syntactic — grammar, sentence structure, and morphological accuracy
• Supralinguistic — higher-order language processing (figurative language, inference, ambiguity resolution)

The CASL-2 reports standard scores (mean 100, SD 15) for individual tests and indexes. It does not use the CELF-5 scaled-score metric (mean 10, SD 3) for its test scores.

What Makes the CASL-2 Different

The CASL-2 assesses spoken language across individually administered tests, and task formats vary by subtest. Some tasks use spoken prompts and verbal responses, while the battery also includes pictures and other visual materials. Look at which subtests were administered when interpreting a child's performance.

The most distinctive feature is the Pragmatic Judgment test, which asks your child to evaluate social scenarios and generate appropriate responses. Unlike the CELF-5's Pragmatics Profile (a supplementary checklist that doesn't produce a standard score), the CASL-2 reports a norm-referenced score for this test.

Reading Your Child's CASL-2 Report

Start with the individual scale scores and look for discrepancies:

• High Lexical/Semantic, low Syntactic: Your child knows words but struggles to combine them into grammatically correct sentences. This pattern often shows up as vocabulary that sounds age-appropriate in casual conversation but breaks down in written assignments or formal speaking tasks.
• Average Syntactic, low Supralinguistic: Grammar is intact, but your child struggles with figurative language, reading between the lines, and understanding implied meaning. This pattern is common in children with social communication difficulties and can affect reading comprehension of literary text.
• Low Pragmatic Judgment: Difficulty with social rules of language — knowing what to say, when to say it, and how to adjust communication for different listeners and contexts. This finding should prompt consideration of whether a broader social communication evaluation is warranted.

CASL-2 vs CELF-5 Score Discrepancies

If your child was given both the CASL-2 and CELF-5, score differences between the two tests are diagnostically useful rather than contradictory.

Children with strong visual processing often score higher on the CELF-5, where several subtests include picture support, than on the purely auditory CASL-2. Children with pragmatic language difficulties may look fine on the CELF-5 (where pragmatics isn't in the composite) but score poorly on the CASL-2's Pragmatic Judgment scale.

Neither test is more "right" than the other. The gap between them tells the evaluator which modalities and which language domains are strong versus weak — information that should directly inform intervention planning.

What to Ask at Your Meeting

• "The CASL-2 Supralinguistic scale is low. How is this affecting my child's ability to understand figurative language and make inferences in reading comprehension?"
• "The Pragmatic Judgment scale shows a deficit. What additional evaluation or classroom observation was done to confirm these social communication difficulties?"
• "My child scored differently on the CASL-2 and the CELF-5. What does that discrepancy tell us about how my child processes auditory versus visual language?"

The Speech-Language Evaluation Decoder covers the CASL-2 alongside the CELF-5, PPVT-5, EVT-3, and GFTA-3, explaining each test's scoring system, what the scales measure, and how to use cross-test comparisons to build your case for appropriate services.