The UK communicative development inventory database: words and gestures ages 8-18 months 2012-2016

Alcock, Katie (2020). The UK communicative development inventory database: words and gestures ages 8-18 months 2012-2016. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-853687

When we study children's language development, it is crucial to know what a "typical" child can do, in order to ensure that teachers, doctors, speech and language therapists, and policy makers are properly informed. For example, it is impossible to assess the impact of socio-economic deprivation on language development without knowing accurately how many words we would typically expect UK children to speak and understand.
Most language milestones occur in the first few years of life, so knowing what is typical for very young children is vital. However, it is extremely difficult to find this out because most language tests cannot be used with very young children. One very good way to find out is to ask parents to fill in Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs). These consist of a checklist of a wide variety of children's communication abilities in speech and gesture. CDI norms (average scores on CDIs) are now used in many countries in almost every area of child language and child development research.
However, no standardised CDIs (i.e. for which we have these average scores), exist for UK English. This has badly affected UK research in child development. UK researchers have been limited both in the types of questions they can answer and the scale of their studies. Existing CDIs are sometimes used by UK researchers but generally these misrepresent the language abilities of British children. One research group for example found that using USA scores with UK children would lead to high numbers of UK children being misdiagnosed as language delayed. As a result if current CDIs are used in the UK they may be worse than useless - they may actively misinform research, practice and policy making.
The 1st aim of this project is to create the first standardised UK CDI - the UK CDI (Words and Gestures), including a brief form that is quicker to complete. This can then be used to establish average scores for UK children aged 8-18 months. The 2nd aim is to use these data for two large-scale studies: a) to find out the effect of socio-economic factors on UK children's language development, especially which put them at risk of language delay and which are protective; and b) to examine differences between children learning UK English, and other languages and English dialects.
The 3rd aim is to work out the best ways to use the CDI, especially with children who are at risk of language delay - how we can best provide instructions for, and support, parents using the questionnaire. The 4th aim is to make our UK data freely available worldwide via a web-based Child Language Database. This can then be integrated into the new international child language database CLEX. This currently contains data from four countries and is used worldwide.
The project will then produce:
1. A published, commercial test/manual of the CDI,
2. Four academic papers in high profile journals,
3. The web-based UK Child Language Database.
The study will make a major contribution to language development research. In particular the UK will be better able to contribute to international debates about early child development. The study will also make public services (e.g. speech and language therapy) and policy making more effective (e.g. if we know more about the effects of social circumstances on language development).
We will publicise our results at national and international academic conferences, through professional journals, and will directly communicate with communities, parents and health professionals who have participated.
Our team have been given Level 1 authorisation by the international CDI governing body to produce the UK adaptation of the CDI. This gives us exclusive rights to publish a UK version. The project will be highly beneficial for UK research and will make a substantial contribution to the wellbeing of children and families in the UK.

Data description (abstract)

We piloted a version based on data from various Babylabs, selecting words for which comprehension significantly increased with age over this range, thus eliminating several words that have been used in previous UK versions. We recruited families throughout the UK; 4575 parents signed up and 1693 contributed data to the norming sample. Families signed up through means ranging from being introduced to the study during an NHS contact (10.3% of those signing up going on to return a completed CDI) to participating through one of a wide range of UK university Babylabs (81% of those signing up through this route completing a CDI, though some were already participating in a study involving a CDI).
Participants in our stratified sample matched the UK population closely by region (eight English regions, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), and were evenly matched on age and gender as far as possible with a mean number of 55 children per combination of age in completed months and gender (range 39-68).
The MacArthur-Bates CDIs (Fenson et al. 1994) are standardised tools for easily assessing language and communicative development in American English, with adaptations to numerous other languages, but no version has yet been standardised in UK English. We report the norming of a MacArthur-Bates Board approved UK version of the Words and Gestures Inventory (the UK-CDI W&G) for children aged 8 to 18 months.

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