Parental reports on language development in toddlers and preschoolers based on the Croatian version of Communicative Development Inventories III

INTRODUCTION: Previous studies have focused on understanding parental attempts to record language development in children, across many typologically different languages. However, many of these studies restricted their assessment to children up to the age of 3 years. The aim of this paper was to move this boundary by examining language development in typically language developed children older than 3 years. METHODS: Using the Croatian version of the Communicative Development Inventories III (CDI-III-HR), we investigated the contribution of parental reports of a child’s lexical, grammatical, and metalinguistic awareness abilities to general language abilities assessed by clinicians. Participants included the parents of 151 children between the ages of 30 to 48 months, who completed the CDI-III-HR and reported on their child’s language abilities. RESULTS: Our results show that age is significantly associated with the lexical, grammatical, and metalinguistic awareness abilities of a child’s language development. These findings confirm that all three abilities increase with age and that parents can perceive changes in a child’s language development. The subsections of CDI-III-HR were moderately to strongly associated with each other, with the strongest association being between lexicon and grammar, suggesting that they remain closely related after the age of 30 months. Parental assessments of a child’s language development are a better predictor of language production than language comprehension, with grammar making the most consistent and significant contribution. DISCUSSION: This study confirms that the development of grammatical abilities is the most prominent skill between the ages of 30 to 48 months and that parents can observe the transition in the child’s language development through their usage of grammar in words to grammar in sentences. Based on the selected sample of children, we discovered different patterns of parental success in assessing the child’s language ability. These findings indicate that parents can act as valuable sources of information regarding the child’s language abilities, but clinical assessments of early language development should consider many other formal sources of information in addition to parental reports.