A short-form version of the Australian English Communicative Development Inventory

Abstract

Purpose: The Australian English Communicative Development Inventory (OZI) is a 558-item parent report tool for assessing language development at 12-30 months. Here, we introduce the short form (OZI-SF), a 100-item, picture-supported, online instrument with substantially lower time and literacy demands. Method: In tool development (Study 1), 95 items were drawn from the OZI to match its item distribution by age of acquisition and semantic categories. Five items were added from four other semantic categories, plus 12 gestures and six games/routines. Simulations computed OZI-SF scores from existing long-form OZI norm data, and OZI and projected OZI-SF scores were correlated. In an independent norming sample (Study 2), parents (n ¼ 230) completed the OZI-SF for their children aged 12-30 months. Child scores were analysed by age and sex. Result: OZI-SF and OZI scores correlate highly across age and language development levels. Vocabulary scores (receptive, expressive) correlate with age and the median for girls is higher until 24 months. By 24 months, 50% of the sample combine words "often". The median time to OZI-SF completion was 12 minutes. Conclusion: Fitted percentiles permit working guidelines for typical (median) performance and lower cut-offs for children who may be behind on age-based expectations and/or at risk for a communication difficulty. The OZI-SF is a short-form of the OZI that has promise for research and clinical/educational use with Australian families.

Developing the Little Kids’ Word List app, a fair assessment tool of communicative development for young Aboriginal children in multilingual families in Central Australia

“…CDIs have been used to develop models and assessments for typically and atypically developing populations, and have been used to identify children whose language development is significantly behind that of their peers at as young as two years of age (Heilmann et al, 2005, p. 40). The CDI tool has been found to be useful to practitioners, and accordingly CDIs have been developed for over 90 languages across the world (Fenson et al, 2000), including for Australian English (Jones et al, 2022;Kalashnikova et al, 2016) and te reo Māori in New Zealand (Reese et al, 2018).…”

“…If this were found to be the case, then a CDI developed for speakers of one Aboriginal language might be a useful beginning point for an adaptation for another Aboriginal language. To explore this possibility, we compare the similarities of the concepts and vocabulary items in the languages in the Little Kids' Word Listdescribed in this paper and developed for four languages in Central Australia -with the CDIs for two other languages spoken in Australia, one the Aboriginal language Kriol, called ERLI (Jones et al, 2020) and the other, Australian English as spoken in Sydney, called OZI-SF (Jones et al, 2022) The third challenge is that an assessment tool needs to be accessible to its potential users, so the format of the tool is an important consideration. In the Central Australian context Aboriginal adults often do not have opportunities to engage frequently with reading and writing in all of the languages they speak.…”

“…This raises the question of whether speakers of other languages beyond Central Australia, with historically shared sociocultural practices, are likely to express similar concepts when interacting with young children. There are two other CDIs developed for Australian populations: one for Indigenous children speaking Kriol (and potentially other languages) in the north of the Northern Territory, called ERLI (Jones, et al, 2020); and the other for mainstream Australian English-speaking children in Sydney, NSW (Jones, et al, 2022, Kalashnikova, 2016. To investigate the question of shared concepts within locally-developed CDIs, we compare the concepts expressed in the three Australian…”

“…CDIs, the Little Kids' Word List, ERLI (Jones et al, 2020) and OZI-SF (Jones et al, 2022;Kalashnikova et al, 2016).…”