The ordering of milestones in language development for children from 1 to 6 years of age

J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2006 Oct;49(5):923-40. doi: 10.1044/1092-4388(2006/067).

Abstract

Purpose: To scale language milestones in a group of 527 children to provide an instrument for screening language development. Procedure The questionnaire regarding these milestones was completed by parental report. It was evaluated whether the scaled milestones satisfied the assumptions of the Mokken item response model.

Results: The scalability of the final scale of 14 milestones was strong (H = .95), its reliability was high (rho = .96), and it satisfied the assumptions of the Mokken model.

Conclusions: A single, unidimensional scale of diverse milestones was developed. It taps lexical, syntactic, and phonological skills, as well as both receptive and expressive language skills, and is well suited for mapping progress in language ability.

MeSH terms

  • Age Factors
  • Child
  • Child Language*
  • Child, Preschool
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Infant
  • Language*
  • Male
  • Mass Screening / methods*
  • Mass Screening / standards
  • Neurolinguistic Programming
  • Parents
  • Reference Values
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Surveys and Questionnaires