Assessing early language and communicative abilities in young children: concurrent and predictive validity of a parent report measure

PÉREZ PEREIRA, M.; RESCHES, M.

Santiago de Compostela

Congreso; V European Congress of Methodology; 2012

Parent report is one of the most extensively used procedures to assess early language and communicative abilities in young children. In the last decades, the Mac Arthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI´s) (Fenson et al, 2007) have become the most influential and reliable tools of this kind, both for research and clinical purposes. The CDI consists of two different checklists designed for children between 8 and 15 months (Words and Gestures) and from 16 to 30 months (Words and Sentences) respectively. The goal of this poster is to explore the concurrent and predictive validity of the long and short forms of the Galician version of the CDI: Words and Sentences, the Inventario do Desenvolvemento de Habilidades Comunicativas (IDHC): Palabras e Oracións (Perez Pereira & García Soto, 2003; Pérez Pereira & Resches, 2007; Perez Pereira & Resches, 2011). In this form, parents report about their children´s productive vocabulary and some aspects of their early grammatical development as well: frequency of word combinations, mean length of the three longest sentences (M3L), early morphological development and syntactic complexity. Normative data from a quite representative and extensive sample of Galician-speaking parents have been previously obtained, as well as indexes of internal consistency and reliability (Perez Pereira & Garcia Soto, 2003; Pérez Pereira & Resches, 2007). In order to explore concurrent and predictive validity, forty-two Galician-speaking children were longitudinally evaluated at age 1; 6, 2; 0 and 4; 0. On the first two occasions, the subjects´ vocabulary and grammar skills were assessed through the IDHC: Palabras e Oracións. Simultaneously, measures of lexical diversity (TTR) and grammatical complexity (MLU) were drawn from these children´s spontaneous speech samples. At age 4;0, standardized measures of general cognitive abilities (WPPSI-R) and receptive and expressive language (RDLS-III) were obtained, so that the long-term, predictive validity of the IDHC could be evaluated. Results showed high and significant levels of concurrent and short-term validity of the IDHC. In addition, strong associations were found between lexical development at age 2;0 and language scores two years later. These results coincide with those obtained with other CDI versions, and suggest that the IDHC is an effective and reliable tool, providing adequate, representative assessment of lexical and grammatical abilities of children at the ages studied.