DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHILDRENS COMMUNICATION CHECKLIST (CCC) - A METHODFOR ASSESSING QUALITATIVE ASPECTS OF COMMUNICATIVE IMPAIRMENT IN CHILDREN

The Children's Communication Checklist (CCC) was developed to assess a spects of communicative impairment that are not adequately evaluated b y contemporary standardised language tests. These are predominantly pr agmatic abnormalities seen in social communication, although other qua litative aspects of speech and language were also included. Some items covering social relationships and restricted interests were incorpora ted, so that the relationship between pragmatic difficulties and other characteristics of pervasive developmental disorders could be explore d. Checklist ratings were obtained for 76 children aged 7 to 9 years, all of whom had received special education for language impairment. In 71 cases, 2 raters (usually a teacher and speech-language therapist) independently completed the checklist, making it possible to establish inter-rater reliability. From an initial pool of 93 items, 70 items, grouped into 9 scales, were retained. Five of the subscales were conce rned with pragmatic aspects of communication. A composite pragmatic im pairment scale formed from these subscales had inter-rater reliability and internal consistency of around .80. This composite discriminated between children with a school diagnosis of semantic-pragmatic disorde r and those with other types of specific language impairment (SLI). Th e majority of children with pragmatic language impairments did not hav e any evidence of restricted interests or significant difficulties in the domains of social relationships.