This study explored the impact of the NICHD protocol to enhance the quantity and content of details reported by children with low verbal abilities. Thirty-four children aged from 6 to 14 were interviewed following their experience of sexual abuse. Half the interviews were conducted using the NICHD protocol. Results indicate that NICHD interviews contained more open-ended prompts and more details overall. Open-ended invitations yielded significantly more detailed responses than did close-ended questions for both children with low and average verbal abilities.Although children with low verbal abilities provided fewer details than children with average verbal abilities, the NICHD protocol helped them provide detailed responses containing the core elements of the sexual abuse. Conducting investigative interviews with child victims of sexual abuse is a complex task for an interviewer, yet is even more challenging with children with intellectual difficulties. For example, results of analog studies (Henry & Gudjonsson, 1999) and a field study (Dion, Cyr, Richard, & McDuff, 2006) indicate that children with intellectual disabilities are likely to provide fewer details when asked to recall an event. Above all cognitive abilities, verbal skills appear to be the most related to children's recall performance (Brown & Pipe, 2003;Chae & Ceci, 2005;Dion et al.). These results are of particular importance considering that children with mental retardation or speech and language difficulties are respectively 4 and almost 3 times more likely to be sexually abused than children without disabilities (Sullivan & Knutson, 2000).It is therefore necessary to evaluate interview techniques that might be useful in helping these children talk about their abuse. The objective of the present study is to explore the impact of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) protocol to enhance details given by children with low verbal abilities (LVA) and to document any differences in response to distinct types of questions.
Intelligence and Verbal AbilitiesMany researchers have explored intelligence in relation to children's abilities to recount an event in various settings, such as a staged event (e.g., Brown & Pipe, 2003;Chae & Ceci, 2005), a video (Henry & Gudjonsson, 2004), or sexual abuse (Dion et al., 2006). When looking at general intelligence, results of studies indicate that the amount of information produced by children with mental retardation during open-ended recall is often lower than that produced by children of the same age with typical intellectual development (Henry & Gudjonsson, 2003Michel, Gordon, Ornstein, & Simpson, 2000).However, inconsistent results are found when using different measures of intelligence (e.g., receptive language, expressive language, visual-motor coordination) to explore the relationship between more specific cognitive abilities (e.g., verbal and nonverbal abilities) and recall. Four explanations are possible for these conflicting results, including: (a) verbal intelligence ...