E. Berglund et M. Eriksson, Communicative development in Swedish children 16-28 months old: The Swedish early communicative development inventory-words and sentences, SC J PSYCHO, 41(2), 2000, pp. 133-144
To describe the development of words and sentences in Swedish children 16-2
8 months old, 900 parental reports on 336 children were analyzed. Subjects
were randomly selected from the national birth register, and there was a re
sponse rate of 88%. The assessments were made using the Swedish Early Commu
nicative Development Inventory-words and sentences (SECDI-w&s).
Age-based norms for productive vocabulary, pragmatic skills, grammar skills
, and maximum length of utterance (MaxLU) were determined. We describe the
development of feedback morphemes, semantic categories, and single words an
d tasks. Correlation across measures was significant, and especially strong
between vocabulary size and grammar skills. Optimized positive predictive
values were high for 25 to 28 month predictions (71%-88%), and vocabulary s
cores were found to be of particular predictive importance. No significant
gender differences were detected. The clinical relevance of the instrument
is discussed.