Cross-cultural exploration of growth in expressive communication of english-speaking infants and toddlers

Increasingly, measurement of child outcomes is becoming an international priority. However, the psychometric properties of standardized measures are rarely explored for populations beyond the country in which the measures were developed. The Early Communication Indicator (ECI) is a measure of infant-toddler expressive communication developed in the U.S. and designed for use by service providers to inform intervention decision making and outcome measurement. Because the ECI measures growth in prelinguistic and spoken language and can be administered in any language, it has implications for international applications. An intervention study with children from disadvantaged backgrounds in Australia that used the ECI provided the opportunity to explore growth in expressive communication for this population. Children in Australia evidenced significant growth on individual key skills and composite growth trajectories of the ECI. These trajectories conformed to a theoretical continuum of growth in expressive language, and trajectories were similar in onset timing, pattern of growth, and 36-month outcomes to children in the U.S. Implications for the ECI’s use for data-driven decision making by early childhood service providers internationally are discussed, as well as limitations and future research directions.