中華心理衛生協會

The primary goal of this study was to develop an age-appropriate tool (Mandarin-Chinese Communicative Development Inventory, MCDI) for assessing the language and communication development of Mandarin-speaking infants and toddlers aged from 8 to 36 months in Taiwan. Methods: The adaptation of the MCDI (Taiwan version) was based on the structure of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory for English-speaking children. The technique of parental report was applied to describe the developmental course and individual variability in core features of language and communication development. This inventory consisted of 2 separate forms. The MCDI/Words and Gestures (Infant Form), which is designed for 8- to 16-month-old infants, assesses vocabulary comprehension/production, phrase comprehension and the use of communication gestures. The MCDI/Words and Sentences (Toddler Form), which is designed for 16- to 36-month-old toddlers, assesses vocabulary production and syntactic complexity. Results: Various precautions were taken during the course of item collection, item analysis, pilot testing, standardization, reliability and validity testing to assure the psychometric properties of this inventory. The month-to-month norm data were collected from a stratified random sample of 2,654 8-36 month-old children in Taiwan. The results of the reliability and validity analyses demonstrated this inventory meets the psychometric criteria, which include a high one-week test-retest reliability, inter-rater reliability, internal consistency, criterion related validity (with the language subscale of the Comprehensive Developmental Inventory for Infants and Toddlers, CDIIT, and laboratory observations), and 6-month predictive validity. Conclusions: This cost-effective inventory with adequate psychometric properties can serve as a clinically valuable tool to screen and identify infants and toddlers with language developmental delay. In addition, results of this study contribute to assessment of theoretical issues in early language development.