In the article "The prediction of success in intensive foreign language training", Carroll defined these components as follows: The data used to calculate the statistical norms for the MLAT were collected in 1958.
For adult norms, the MLAT was administered to about one thousand military and civilian employees of the government.
The test was given to the subjects before starting a language course in a school or university or an intensive training program of the US Government.
Their performance in the language program was later compared to their score on the MLAT to determine the predictive validity of the test.
The uses for the Modern Language Aptitude Test include selection, placement and diagnosis of learning abilities.
In 1967, Carroll and Sapon authored the Modern Language Aptitude Test – Elementary (EMLAT; more recently, MLAT-E).
It also includes a new section called Finding Rhymes, which tests the subject's ability to hear speech sounds.
Accordingly, proper use of the MLAT would be to use it as one part of a more comprehensive assessment of the learner, or to use the test in a setting where motivation is known to be uniformly high.
In 1998,[3] research conducted by Madeline Ehrman, Director of Research and Evaluation at the U.S. Foreign Service Institute, where adult government employees are enrolled in a communication oriented intensive language program, produced validity coefficients at approximately the same levels as the original validity coefficients from 1958.
Also, research by Leila Ranta (Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at University of Alberta) as well as Harley and Hart (with the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto) has shown an association between good language analytic ability and good language learners in a communicative learning environment (2002).