Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T08:47:50.118Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Assessing early communicative ability: a cross-reporter cumulative score for the MacArthur CDI

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2005

ANNICK DE HOUWER ,
MARC H. BORNSTEIN  and
DIANE B. LEACH
ANNICK DE HOUWER
Affiliation:
University of Antwerp, Belgium
MARC H. BORNSTEIN
Affiliation:
Department of Health and Human Services, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health
DIANE B. LEACH
Affiliation:
Department of Health and Human Services, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Thirty middle- to upper middle-class monolingual Dutch speaking families consisting of at least a mother and a father completed the Infant Form ‘Words and Gestures’ of the Dutch adaptation of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory for the same child at 1;1. Considerable inter- and intrafamily variation emerged in how two (or three) different reporters who are all presumably close to the child assess a particular child's communicative abilities. The greater the child's communicative ability, as rated by any one reporter, the more differences tended to emerge between reporters. In order to take into account multiple reporters' assessments of the same child, we propose the use of a Cumulative CDI Score that credits the child with the best score for any item on the CDI as checked by any single reporter. We conclude that single reporter CDI reports may underestimate the child's communicative knowledge.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , November 2005 , pp. 735 - 758
Copyright
2005 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

We are grateful to Inge Zink & Marilyn Lejaegere for letting us use the Dutch pre-publication version of the N-CDI, to Griet Ramaekers & Veerle Vantorre for coding and preliminary analyses, and to all the families who took part in the study. Financing was made possible by NIH research contracts 263-MD-005126 & 263-MD-104775.