Development of communicative skills in 8-to 16-month-old children: A longitudinal study

The aim of this study was to assess development of communicative skills in 8- to 16-month-old children. Information on 24 Swedish children's speech comprehension and production, as well as their utilization of communicative gestures was collected. A version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory, the Swedish Early Communicative Development Inventory (SECDI), was used. The number of comprehended phrases, size of receptive and productive vocabularies, as well as the subjects' gesture score was estimated according to standardized scoring instructions. The study was performed longitudinally based on 71 completed forms. The children's performance was validated with existing norm-data collected from a large set of randomly selected children. The results showed an overall agreement with the norm-data. The performance of the subjects was though less stable and delayed about one month as compared to the norm-data. Adequacy of SECDI for screening language delay is discussed.