MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs): Words and Gestures, NCS Scannable

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The CDI: Words and Gestures Forms are for children ages 8–18 months. In the form, the first part prompts parents to document the child’s understanding of hundreds of early vocabulary items separated into semantic categories such as animal names, household items, and action words. Parents mark the words understood or used, and the forms yield separate indexes of words understood and words produced. The second part of each form asks parents to record the communicative and symbolic gestures the child has tried or completed.

These forms are part of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs). The CDIs and their Spanish adaptation, the Inventarios, are standardized, parent-completed report forms that track young children's language and communication skills. Top language researchers developed the report forms, designing them to focus on current behaviors and salient emergent behaviors that parents can recognize and track.

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Learn more about the MacArthur-Bates CDIs.

Donna J. Thal, Ph.D., holds a master of science degree in speech pathology and audiology from Brooklyn College and a doctorate in speech and hearing sciences from the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). She has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Research in Language at UCSD, an assistant professor at Hofstra University, and an assistant professor at Queens College of CUNY. Dr. Thal is a developmental psycholinguist and a certified and licensed speech-language pathologist who has conducted research in a number of areas, including normal and disordered development of language and cognition, children with focal brain injury, and children with delayed onset of language. She has also carried out studies of language development in Spanish-speaking infants and toddlers. Her most recent work focuses on early identification of risk for clinically significant language impairment and is funded by a grant from the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders (NIDCD), within the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Thal is an editorial consultant for language for the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research and the American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. She was the California State nominee for the American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation Outstanding Clinical Achievement Award in 1996, received the Monty Distinguished Faculty Award from SDSU 1998 and the Albert W. Johnson Research Lecturer Award from SDSU in 1999, and was the Wang Family Excellence Award nominee from SDSU in 2000. She served a 4-year term on the Communicative Disorders Review Committee for the NIDCD from 1998 to 2002. Dr. Thal is a co-author of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories.

Philip S. Dale, Ph.D., is Professor in Departments of Psychology, Linguistics, and Speech and Hearing Sciences at University of Washington. Dr. Dale's research interests include assessment of young children's language, language development in exceptional populations including linguistically precocious children, early language and cognition, and the effects of various models of intervention for young children with disabilities.

J. Steven Reznick, Ph.D., is an affiliate of the Department of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Dr. Bates was a founding member of the Cognitive Science Department at University of California at San Diego (the first of its kind in the world), the Director of the federally-funded UCSD Project in Cognitive and Neural Development, a founding co-director of the innovative Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communicative Disorders at San Diego State University and UCSD, and the Director of the Center for Research in Language and Professor of Cognitive Science at UCSD. With strengths in developmental psychology, linguistics, neurology, and cognitive science, she carried out many creative and influential collaborative studies on the interrelations among language acquisition, brain function, symbolic growth, and other key aspects of development. During her extensive career, she directed cross-linguistic studies on 4 continents and authored or co-authored 10 books and more than 200 scientific publications. Her work was interdisciplinary, influencing diverse fields such as neuroscience, linguistics, biology, psychology, computer science, and medicine.

Donna Jackson-Maldonado, Ph.D., is a researcher who has lived in Mexico since her childhood. She is a bilingual specialist in monolingual and bilingual language development in children with different language disorders and those who are typically developing. She has developed several language assessment instruments, including the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories.

Larry Fenson, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology at San Diego State University in California. Dr. Fenson has published research on infant attentiveness, early symbolic development, categorization, children's drawing skills, play, and early language development. He received his doctorate in child psychology from the University of Iowa. He served as Assistant Professor at the University of Denver and was a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development postdoctoral fellow with Jerome Kagan at Harvard University. Dr. Fenson is Chair of The CDI Advisory Board.

Dr. Marchman earned her doctoral degree in Developmental Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego. She served on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Texas at Dallas and was named Distinguished Scholar at the Callier Center for Communication Disorders. She is currently a research scientist in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University and the Department of Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Marchman has conducted research in several areas of language and cognitive development, language disorders, and early childhood development. Her most recent work focuses on individual differences in language-processing efficiency and vocabulary development in monolingual English and bilingual (Spanish/English) children born full term and preterm. Dr. Marchman is a member of the MacArthur-Bates CDI Advisory Board, the developer of the CDI Scoring Program, and a contributor to Web-CDI, the CDI-CAT, and Wordbank.