UK standardisation of Communicative Development Inventory - Words & Gestures

When we study children's language development, it is crucial to know what a "typical" child can do, in order to ensure that teachers, doctors, speech and language therapists, and policy makers are properly informed. For example, it is impossible to assess the impact of socio-economic deprivation on language development without knowing accurately how many words we would typically expect UK children to speak and understand.
Most language milestones occur in the first few years of life, so knowing what is typical for very young children is vital. However, it is extremely difficult to find this out because most language tests cannot be used with very young children. One very good way to find out is to ask parents to fill in Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs). These consist of a checklist of a wide variety of children's communication abilities in speech and gesture. CDI norms (average scores on CDIs) are now used in many countries in almost every area of child language and child development research.
However, no standardised CDIs (i.e. for which we have these average scores), exist for UK English. This has badly affected UK research in child development. UK researchers have been limited both in the types of questions they can answer and the scale of their studies. Existing CDIs are sometimes used by UK researchers but generally these misrepresent the language abilities of British children. One research group for example found that using USA scores with UK children would lead to high numbers of UK children being misdiagnosed as language delayed. As a result if current CDIs are used in the UK they may be worse than useless - they may actively misinform research, practice and policy making.
The 1st aim of this project is to create the first standardised UK CDI - the UK CDI (Words & Gestures), including a brief form that is quicker to complete. This can then be used to establish average scores for UK children aged 8-18 months. The 2nd aim is to use these data for two large-scale studies: a) to find out the effect of socio-economic factors on UK children's language development, especially which put them at risk of language delay and which are protective; and b) to examine differences between children learning UK English, and other languages and English dialects.
The 3rd aim is to work out the best ways to use the CDI, especially with children who are at risk of language delay - how we can best provide instructions for, and support, parents using the questionnaire. The 4th aim is to make our UK data freely available worldwide via a web-based Child Language Database. This can then be integrated into the new international child language database CLEX. This currently contains data from four countries and is used worldwide (http://www.cdi-clex.org/).
The project will then produce:
1. A published, commercial test/manual of the CDI,
2. Four academic papers in high profile journals,
3. The web-based UK Child Language Database.
The study will make a major contribution to language development research. In particular the UK will be better able to contribute to international debates about early child development. The study will also make public services (e.g. speech and language therapy) and policy making more effective (e.g. if we know more about the effects of social circumstances on language development).
We will publicise our results at national and international academic conferences, through professional journals, and will directly communicate with communities, parents and health professionals who have participated.
Our team have been given Level 1 authorisation by the international CDI governing body to produce the UK adaptation of the CDI. This gives us exclusive rights to publish a UK version. The project will be highly beneficial for UK research and will make a substantial contribution to the wellbeing of children and families in the UK.

Beneficiaries of this work are public and private sectors, voluntary organisations, the general public and the media. In the public, private and third sectors, these include health professionals, pre-school education specialists, policymakers, community and voluntary groups, parents and their children.

Users will benefit from using the CDI and also from the database which will be standardised and normed, easy to use and inexpensive or free. The database provides a range of information including vocabulary category and size, age of acquisition of words and gestures, and word frequency. The CDI itself, the manual and database will contribute to effectiveness of public services. The availability of UK-wide vocabulary norms and the database will inform and guide policy recommendations throughout the UK, which will, in, turn contribute to improving the quality of life of families with children with, and at risk of, language delay.

Public and private sector groups and parents are informed about studies, allow them to take place on site and/or advertise for us. We keep such groups engaged by providing regular feedback including results of studies in non-specialist terms, through mailings, posters and lab open days.

Targeted relationships with professional groups will continue via dissemination of results, with recommendations for practical uses, in print, via user-friendly websites and electronic newsletters. Email notifications of website, CDIs and database updates will keep those who have attended events or workshops informed. We will distribute user-friendly summaries of our research and its applicability to policy-makers in the NHS and UK Government, including the DoH and the DfE, and equivalent bodies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Government research initiatives will benefit from both publications and access to the CDI and database to inform current (e.g. Children's Centres) and future projects (e.g. the 2012 Cohort).
The CDI will be available via publishers and database updates via electronic newsletter mailing lists. In the private sector, publishers of language assessment instruments will benefit from our initiative and will profit from publishing the CDI manuals and score sheets. We are currently negotiating with Pearson Assessment about publication. Communication and engagement plans will follow the ESRC and publisher's guidelines.

The media will benefit from our research as we will make ourselves accessible to print and broadcast media and be proactive in advertising our research, its results and products. We will employ the ESRC's Communications Toolkit to plan dissemination to media outlets locally, nationally and internationally. All universities have established press offices to assist in dissemination.

Both short-, medium- and long-term impact will be seen, ranging from immediate feedback to parents and children participating in questionnaire and standardised testing phases, through medium-term descriptions of the results to participant organisations, and media and professional journal articles, to very long-term outcomes for children in the UK as a whole via policy recommendations. Likewise, those directly involved and local to the study sites will benefit, but so will children, families, and professionals UK-wide, as well as professionals internationally who will be able to use the UK database to examine and compare cross-linguistic and cross-cultural data and norms.