Parental reports of communicative development at the age of 36 months: The Estonian CDI-III

Abstract

Parental reports are a widely-used source of information about infants’ and toddlers’ communicative skills, but parent-report instruments valid for children older than 30 months are less known. This study explored individual variability in children’s communicative skills at the age of 3;0 via parental reports using the Estonian (E) CDI-III. The validity of ECDI-III was established through correlations with another parent-report instrument (ECDI-II) and a standardized examiner-administered language assessment (New Reynell Developmental Language Scales; NRDLS). A hundred Estonian-speaking children ( M age = 35.77 months, age range from 34 to 39 months; 20 of them with reported language difficulties) participated in the study. Relations between different communicative skills and the impact of such factors as the child’s gender, maternal and paternal education, reported language difficulties, the number of siblings, and day care attendance on variability in vocabulary size were also considered. The results showed that the ECDI-III components were moderately to strongly associated with each other, with the ECDI-II and NRDLS. Children with reported language difficulties scored lower on all language measures, except for orthographic awareness. Girls, children of more educated mothers, children with older siblings, and those who had attended day care for more months obtained higher vocabulary scores.

Parental Reports of Preschoolers' Lexical and Syntactic Development: Validation of the CDI-III for European Portuguese

“…A large correlation between the vocabulary and syntax scores of the CDI-III-PT was found, similarly to the ones obtained in other CDI-III versions (Eriksson, 2017;Tulviste and Schults, 2020). When correlations between the syntax scale and each of the different sections of the vocabulary scale are considered, higher correlation is found between the syntax scale and the section Vocabulary-mental terms.…”

“…Regarding validity evidence, mediumto-large intercorrelations between the subscales of the CDI-III and medium correlations between the scores in the CDI-III and other standardized measures were found. The results of the study also indicated that being a girl, having a higher number of older siblings, having attended day care for a longer time, having a mother with higher educational levels, and having no reported language difficulties are factors associated with a higher score in the vocabulary subscale (Tulviste and Schults, 2020). The effect of these demographic variables on the remaining CDI-III subscales was not tested.…”

“…This version was based on the Swedish version and presents a similar structure, albeit with some variation in the number of items of each subscale. The results of the validation study (Tulviste and Schults, 2020), in which the reports of 100 Estonian-speaking children aged between 2;10 and 3;3 were analyzed, indicated high levels of internal consistency for the vocabulary and syntax subscales, but low levels for the metalinguistic awareness subscales, probably due to the low number of items. Regarding validity evidence, mediumto-large intercorrelations between the subscales of the CDI-III and medium correlations between the scores in the CDI-III and other standardized measures were found.…”

“…More recently, an Estonian adaptation was developed (Tulviste and Schults, 2020). This version was based on the Swedish version and presents a similar structure, albeit with some variation in the number of items of each subscale.…”

“…Table 2 presents the demographic characteristics of the sample (note: the final N for each age month can be consulted The numbers presented within brackets are the number of items in each subscale. *For the Estonian version, so far only a study with children aged between 2;10 and 3.3 was published (Tulviste and Schults, 2020). The norming study for the age range 2;6-4;0 is ongoing.…”