Parental screening measures for language development in Russian

Abstract

While a variety of well-established standardised language assessment tools exist in English-speaking countries, only very a few standardised tests with clear norms are available in Russian. The aim of the present study was to contribute to a further development of tests of language ability for monolingual Russian-speaking children. One way to screen young children for a developmental language disorder is by the means of parental questionnaires. However, no such questionnaires are currently standardised for Russian language. We assessed which of the two parent-reported questionnaires, the Russian adaptation of the Children’s Communication Checklist-2 (CCC-2) or the Russian version of the 8-item questionnaire assessing ‘Current Language Skills’ is a more reliable predictor of children’s performance on direct measures of language. The two composite scores available in the CCC-2 (General Communication Composite (GCC), a measure of formal/structural language, and the General Pragmatic Composite (GenPragC), a measure of pragmatic competence) as well as the ‘Current Language Skills’ measure were correlated with the results of a direct assessment of structural and pragmatic language. 19 monolingual typically-developing Russian-speaking children aged between 4;0 and 6;8 years and their parents participated in the study. A strong relationship was found between the parent-reported ‘Current Language Skills’ questionnaire and a direct measure of expressive vocabulary (a Russian version of the Cross Linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLTs), noun production subtest). These results suggest that further investigation is warranted into establishing the validity of a Russian adaptation of the parental questionnaire assessing ‘Current Language Skills’ as a screening tool for a language disorder