The Early Communication Indicator (ECI) is a measure relevant to intervention decision making and progress monitoring for infants and toddlers. With increasing recognition of the importance of quality early childhood education and intervention for all children, measurement plays an important role in documenting children's progress and outcomes of…

The study examined actual communicative expressions of five 3-year-old profoundly, prelingually deaf children and their mothers, along with nonverbal contextual information. Each subject was videotaped in the home while interacting with the mother in toy play and usual daily activity. Results identified more than 4,500 communicative expressions,…

This study compared early pragmatic skill development in 76 children (ages 1-4) with severe or profound hearing loss enrolled in either a simultaneous communication (SC) or oral communication (OC) approach to language learning. Results indicated some advantages of the SC approach, although overall frequency of communication and breadth of…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine and compare the development of proto-imperative and proto-declarative utterances in normally developing, non-neonatally screened, profoundly deaf toddlers. Method: Both types of proto-declarative are considered to be the most basic prelinguistic and early linguistic communicative functions.…