Developing a parent vocabulary checklist for young Indigenous children growing up multilingual in the Katherine region of Australia's Northern Territory

Purpose: The aim of this study was to develop a checklist to assess vocabulary development in Indigenous Australian children, with a local focus on Indigenous Australian children growing up in the towns and communities of the Katherine Region in the Northern Territory of Australia. In this region, many families are multilingual and/or multidialectal and children’s home languages include varieties of Aboriginal English, Kriol, traditional Aboriginal languages, and/or other languages. Method: Over four years, a checklist was iteratively developed from parent interviews, comparisons of potential items to the content and structure of the Communicative Development Inventories (CDI): Words & Gestures (Short Form), team discussions and pilot testing with 33 parents of infants aged 0–4 years. Result: The Early Language Inventory (ERLI) checklist offers new content compared with the CDI: Words & Gestures (short form) and the OZI (Australian English CDI, long form). Initial data from 33 parents suggests the checklist has desirable features: scores correlated positively with age and related to word combining, reaching ceiling around 3 years of age for many children. Infants whose parents had concerns tended to have lower scores. Conclusion: ERLI is a new local adaptation of the CDI (Words & Gestures) for assessing early communication among Indigenous infants growing up in the Katherine region of the Northern Territory, Australia

The Hearing and Talking Scale (HATS) : development and validation with young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in urban and remote settings in Australia

Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are affected by chronic middle ear infection or otitis media from infancy that has a negative impact on development of listening and communication skills. Deficits in these skills are often not detected until school-age when the opportunity for early intervention is lost. Primary health and early childhood workers need screening tools to assist them with detecting the problem early, but there is a scarcity of tools. This study reports the development and validation of a screening tool for detecting communication problems in young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. The tool, called the Hearing and Talking Scale (HATS), relies on a systematic use of parent observations of communication behaviours of their children in everyday situations. Developed by using a co-design approach, the HATS is culturally and linguistically appropriate for use with parents/carers of young children by front-line workers not trained in speech-language pathology. We validated the HATS by comparing the HATS score of 68 children (46 Indigenous and 22 non-Indigenous children) with their performance in standardised assessments. The accuracy of the HATS was 80% and 81% when compared to the ASQ-TRAK and the Expressive Vocabulary Test respectively. The HATS takes 5 minutes to administer, and is easy to score and interpret. It can be used as part of a standard ear and hearing health check for young children to support early detection so that those with problems can be referred for specialist diagnosis and treatment at a young age