Children's Communication Checklist (CCC) scores in 11-year-old children with communication impairments

Abstract

Background: The pragmatic skills of children with communication disorders and their assessment are currently an issue for speech and language therapy and educational placement. Aims: To explore whether different subgroups of children with communication disorders score differently on the Children’s Communication Checklist (CCC; Bishop, 1998) and how they compare to published normative data. Methods and procedures: A sample of 161 eleven year old children with a history of communication disorders were assessed using the CCC. The main use of this questionnaire is to establish whether pragmatic impairments are part of a child’s communication difficulty. Although the checklist was originally designed for research purposes, Bishop & Baird (2001) have recently published normative data for this scale as well as group data from a number of different clinical groups. Whilst our CCC data has been previously reported descriptively for a wider sample (Conti-Ramsden et al, 2001), it has not been examined in terms of subgroups or compared directly to normative information and similarly diagnosed individuals from other studies. Outcomes and Results: Of the children assessed 52 (33%) scored in the normal range (within 1sd) on the pragmatic scale, 40 (26%) fell between 1 and 2 sd below the normative mean and 64 (41%) scored below 2sd the mean of typically developing children (aged 6-16yrs) who were reported by Bishop and Baird (2001). Thus the majority (67%) scored out of the normal range for pragmatic skill at 11 years of age. The cohort was separated into 4 diagnostic sub-categories: Those with a definite diagnosis of Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD; n=13); those with typical specific language impairment (SLI; n=29); generally impaired (LILowIQ; n=30); those with a clinical history of primary Pragmatic Language Impairment (PLI; independent of CCC score, n= 27). Conclusions: Findings show that those with SLI and LilowIQ were less impaired than the other groups on the CCC pragmatic scale. There was a significant trend for those with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) to score lowest through PLI, LilowIQ to SLI. It is argued that a cut off of 140 may prove to be more useful at this age than the 132 level previously published for 8 year olds. Results suggest that the CCC can be used as a clinical tool, but in conjunction with other reliable measures